Beijing Haze Blurs City Charm
Since Will Yorke opened the Vineyard Cafe in 2006, he has grown his restaurant to three locations in Beijing, where he resides as a British expatriate. In spite of the international flavor of Yorke’s restaurant and China’s capital city generally, it has been Chinese consumers who have been growing the business.
“The Chinese are a more consistent clientele,” Yorke said. “You can have a foreign customer who is very loyal, but then he leaves and that’s it.”
The declining number of foreigners hanging around seems to be a common trend in businesses across Beijing. Yorke is neither the first nor the last person to take notice, but the trend has so far been too recent to quantify with hard numbers.
While residents of Beijing point to many factors contributing to the potential exodus, foreign media has been quick to implicate China’s proverbial elephant in the room: air pollution.
Beijing saw record high levels of PM2.5, or particulate matter measuring 2.5 micrometers in diameter or smaller, in January 2013, reaching as high as 40 times the recommended level by the World Health Organization. The 2013 World Economic Forum report on travel and tourism competitiveness also ranked China 112 out of 140 countries for particulate matter concentration.
This news has been coupled with negative coverage of other health-related topics, including the H7N9 bird flu and thousands of pig carcasses found floating down Shanghai’s Huangpu River.
Even with other scandals, pollution has dominated the narrative of China abroad.
In October, the Beijing Youth Daily, a state-owned media outlet in China, reported numbers from the Beijing Municipal Tourism Committee showing tourism declined 50 percent in the first three quarters of 2013. The Wall Street Journal was quick to pick up the story, citing pollution as a main driver of the new trend even though the Youth Daily did not mention it.
The Associated Press ran a similar story a couple months earlier, citing economists and the China National Tourism Administration as pointing to higher pollution as contributing to the decline in tourism.
Though many vendors in Beijing and outlets like the Youth Daily prefer to point to foreign economic recessions as the main culprit, it does not explain why a recession that started in the U.S. in 2008 and is now largely over in most of the world would still be affecting travel abroad.
Daniel McCrohan, author of the Lonely Planet guidebooks to Beijing and China, also pointed to the economic downturn rather than pollution, but didn’t rule out the latter’s effect.
“I suspect that growing pollution does have an effect on tourism here, but I doubt the effect is huge,” McCrohan said in an email. “I think the decline in tourism in 2013 is more likely to be because of the on-going financial difficulties of potential tourists, coupled with the fact that China is getting more expensive each year.”
McCrohan said falling tourism was not unique to China, but projections from the World Travel and Tourism Council indicate the industry is still growing. The WTTC projected in November that tourism will prove to have grown GDP by 2.9 percent in 2013, roughly the same as the 3 percent seen in 2012.
The Council also reported that international tourist arrivals grew 5.3 percent between January and August and that the Asia-Pacific region had not fared as well as other regions in hotel occupancy. Industry growth seems to be mostly fueled by improving conditions in Europe, according to the group.
While tourism is more easily measured in the short term, changes to Beijing’s foreign resident population may not be known for some time. However, there is no short supply of anecdotes like Yorke’s.
Lennart Huss, the chief technical officer at Hainan Shenzhou, said there were three Swedes at the renewable energy company when he first arrived in China. He is now the only one, he said.
Jack Smith, 28, works in a hospital and occasionally gives pollution awareness seminars. He said he has also seen a decline in foreigners, but noted that his evidence is only anecdotal.
After Beijing’s “Airpocalypse” in 2013, the Financial Times and Christian Science Monitor both ran stories about the city’s newfound challenge in recruiting and retaining talent from abroad. The Monitor reported that some companies were offering hazard pay to get people to stay.
Some within China have come to see all the negative press as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Ma Yongliang, an associate professor of air pollution control in Tsinghua University’s School of Environment, said negative foreign press was “demonizing China and creating a sense of fear in people’s mind.”
“Among all Chinese cities, Beijing’s condition of air pollution is intermediate in terms of seriousness,” he said. “Beijing started to improve its air quality in 1998 in preparation for the Olympic Games. The environmental condition has been better than fifteen years ago.”
Since the U.S. Embassy started publishing its air quality index for Beijing in 2009, public outcries in China have prompted government response. Xi Jinping, who became president of China in early 2013, has publicly made calls to curb pollution.
Ma said controlling pollution in the future will mostly come from more regulation and better enforcement.
“For the government, usually their part is to set up industrial standards and intensify their execution of laws and regulations,” he said. “Our long-term plan is to adjust our industrial structure and optimize our energy structure to rely less on industries and energies that produce large numbers of pollutants. In the meantime, we need more regulations.”
However pollution affects foreign travel to Beijing, travel and tourism only accounted for about 2.6 percent of China’s GDP, about $244.7 million, in 2012, according to the WTTC. This is not a sum any country would wish to lose, but China’s growth is largely fueled by a rapidly expanding middle class.
Yorke has shown that foreigners who stick around can still be successful with or without fellow expats. While pollution is a concern and Yorke said he didn’t like the idea of his children developing their lungs in a polluted environment, he said it’s compounding factors that drive people to leave, not one thing.
Yorke said he will eventually return home to be closer to his parents and avoid high education expenses for his children, but added that China has been a good host.
“It’s (all these) factors, but other than that, I’d quite happily stay in China forever,” Yorke said.
