BEIJING — It was a one-two punch: first air pollution, and then the bureaucracy.
Sara Zhang, like many Beijing residents, has taken precautions at home to protect herself and her two children from the city’s notorious air pollution. Yet her 7-year-old son’s public school, Yunhe Elementary, has not installed any air purifiers — machines common in the city’s expensive private schools — leaving its students no choice but to breathe the toxic air.
Zhang, 39, recently joined other parents to offer a few air purifiers to the school at no cost. Yet school administrators refused, and their reason — that the government has not approved the purifiers’ use — led her to a Kafkaesque experience.
“We called the (local) education committee, and the Education Ministry, and we got different answers from everyone who picked up the phone,” Zhang said. “Some said that no air purifiers have been deemed acceptable for classrooms; some said we should write up suggestions and they’d report to their superiors. But everyone basically told us that it’s impossible to have them installed.”
December ranked among Beijing’s worst air pollution months in recent memory. Authorities announced two “red alert” smog warnings, forcing school closings across the city.
Yet even on normal days, the city was shrouded in a toxic haze, and the reluctance of many public schools to install air purifiers — many of which are proven to improve indoor air quality — has infuriated parents and demonstrated the Chinese bureaucracy’s inability to deal with some immediate effects of the country’s environmental crisis.
A representative of the city’s official school board said by phone that the board does not “encourage” schools to accept air purifiers from parents.
“We encourage schools to suspend classes on heavy pollution days,” the representative said.
“We’re working with the Ministry of Education and experts from Tsinghua University on what kinds of air purifiers are fit for schools, and we’ll come up with a citywide plan for air purification in schools,” she said. “This is not just a job for the Ministry of Education; it also involves the State Administration of Work Safety and the Ministry of Environmental Protection.”
She did not say when the plan would be implemented, and she hung up before giving her name.
An employee at a state-owned enterprise said her 18-year-old stepdaughter’s schools had not installed air purifiers and that after the recent smog siege, she has decided to soon move her family to Hainan, an island in China’s deep south.
“Smoggy days in Beijing are so, so common now. This happens at least once or twice a week,” said the woman, who gave only her surname, Wang, so that she could criticize the government without fear of retaliation. “They can’t make students stay at home every week indefinitely. And a lot of parents work full time; they can’t stay home from work once or twice a week to take care of their children.
“The pollution is so bad it makes life in this city practically unlivable,” she said. “This is such a massive problem, and the government isn’t solving it. So what kinds of problems is the government here to solve?”
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