Magazine N°158

BEIJING: POLLUTION TAMED BY BIG DATA

This summer, the Beijing sky finally looked like a summer sky: blue! Last winter, the same. On a clear day, you could even see the mountains on which the Great Wall of China runs, a good hour from the city. And now it's the same every time the weather's fine. Gone, then, is the leaden atmosphere, the perpetual greyness, the cut-throat smog that suffocated the Chinese capital almost continuously, and well beyond reason. It was a monstrosity, with pollution levels that outraged Beijingers as a whole and began to seriously worry expatriates, with American and Japanese nationals even receiving risk premiums.

Faced with the scourge, the health problems, and perhaps also the injunctions of national and international public opinion, the government authorities nonetheless reacted and put in place the 2013-2017 ecological plan, which seems to have borne fruit. How did they go about it? Authoritarian closures of 2,000 factories - cement works, coal-fired power stations and other heavy industries -, a switch from coal to gas for heating in residential buildings, quotas on private electricity consumption, the elimination of two million polluting vehicles, a bonus for the purchase of an electric vehicle and the introduction of a bike-sharing system... Above all, however, there has been a spectacular shift towards an all-digital Beijing, led by the nearby Zhongguancun technology park - yet another new Silicon Valley - which now boasts no fewer than 25,000 companies, including 90 % SMEs, working in the technology, information and communications sectors.

The result is astonishing, even in the daily lives of Beijingers. Because if they can't access Google, Uber, Facebook, WhatsApp or Gmail, which are blocked, they use other means of communication, especially WeChat, which acts as WhatsApp, Uber, Facebook, Amazon and even a credit card. All under the watchful eye of facial recognition cameras generously placed on street corners - there are 170 million of them in China today, and 600 million are expected by 2020. Which, incidentally, doesn't seem to bother them that much. But not foreigners, who immediately grasp the clever applications of big data.
In other words, as described by Orwell in 1984, a possible version of hell on earth.

Serge Barret, Editor-in-Chief