Got the G20 Blues? Putting China’s Environmental Progress in Context
In the final days before the G20 meeting starts in Hangzhou, you’ll see a phrase used around Chinese social media, but in particular by people in and around the Yangtze River Delta and the city of Hangzhou: G20 blue.
A relatively blue sky day in Shanghai from the roof of my social enterprise LOHAUS
At first this buzzword may seem to be one of those under-the-radar social commentaries that China’s cynical Netizens are apt to make to avoid Internet censorship: Rather than directly writing, “The air quality will soon go back to giving us cancer! :_( ” — which might get deleted for making an unfounded scientific claim or spreading rumors — they instead write, “Enjoy G20 blue while you can! ;-) ” But here’s a question, and a hope: Could G20 blue be here to stay?
It is of course an unfortunate necessity to qualify the color of the sky in China’s major cities, but where did this idea come from in the first place? The phrase can trace its origins back to when Beijing hosted the 2008 Olympics, when China widely reported its progress on achieving a certain number of so-called Blue Sky Days. The number of blue-sky days was a yearly target and defined by a five-level environmental standard for air quality. There was an evident mismatch between what constituted ‘good’ air and what would actually result in a ‘blue’ sky, resulting in many days that were blue only in the sense of sadness — depressingly grey and overcast — instead of azure.