On Saturday, China's capital turned into the Red Planet. Severe sandstorms, the strongest this year, swept in from the country's vast northern deserts and laid siege to this city, covering it in swathes of red dust and bringing life to a standstill.
Sandstorms are a regular part of life in Beijing. But in recent years, they have become more intense as a result of spreading desertification in China's arid north and northwest, yet another indicator of the country's growing environmental crisis. As much as one-third of the country is now covered in desert, and the number of sandstorms has jumped six-fold in the last six decades to two dozen a year, estimates the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Before the storms hit Beijing this weekend, they had, for two weeks, ravaged much of the northwest, from western Xinjiang to Inner Mongolia. On Saturday, it was the turn of Beijingers to wake up to an eerie, orange-red sky. Thick, red mushroom clouds of dust rained down tonnes of sand for hours, covering cars, sprinkling Tiananmen Square with yellow dust and confining people to their homes. The Meteorological Bureau issued a warning to residents to stay indoors with the air quality reaching “hazardous” levels, albeit a far from unusual occurrence in one of the world's most polluted cities.
Getting worse
Resident Liao Jianlin (53) said he could not recall storms of such scale when he was growing up in this city. “The storms are getting worse now every year, there was little sandy weather during the '80s or '90s,” he told The Hindu . “The most serious period was the early 2000s, when this would happen more than 10 times a year.”
He said the government needed to pay more attention “to the health of the environment.”
“The government should put in more regulations to stop the factories that continue to illegally pollute,” Mr. Jianlin said.
Guo Hu, head of the Beijing Meteorological Station, said the situation had begun to improve following afforestation drives in recent years. The city had only one sandstorm last year, he told State-run Xinhua news agency.
The storms were still far worse in the country's northern areas, said Wu Guang, a native of Zhangjiakou in Hebei province, which borders Inner Mongolia and faces the full impact of the Gobi desert's winds.
“Back home, the storms are much stronger,” said Mr. Wu, who moved to Beijing five years ago.
