{"id":12463,"date":"2011-12-07T12:04:26","date_gmt":"2011-12-07T16:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=12463"},"modified":"2011-12-07T12:04:26","modified_gmt":"2011-12-07T16:04:26","slug":"beijings-smog-blog-at-the-us-embassy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/12\/07\/beijings-smog-blog-at-the-us-embassy\/","title":{"rendered":"Beijing&#8217;s &#8220;smog blog&#8221; at the US Embassy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The official line is that the smog in Beijing is merely inconvenient, while the US Embassy&#8217;s Twitter account sends out regular readings that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/environment\/blog\/2011\/dec\/07\/blog-beijing-smog\" target=\"_blank\">conflict with the official story<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>It was a contest over smog that was being fought across two social networks in two completely different languages between two contenders separated by the world&#8217;s biggest firewall. At stake was the authority to define &#8220;unhealthy air&#8221; and, as a result, to shape public perceptions and expectations.<\/p>\n<p>On one side was an automated air quality monitoring station set up by the US embassy in Beijing that issues hourly updates via Twitter on the <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/beijingair\" target=\"_blank\">@beijingair account<\/a>. It states the date, time, pollutions readings for ozone and PM2.5 and a terse English summary of the health implications. At 8am, it read &#8220;very unhealthy&#8221; &mdash; an improvement on the &#8220;hazardous&#8221; level of the previous day and the alarming &#8220;beyond index&#8221; of last Friday.<\/p>\n<p>On the other side was the personal microblog of Du Shaozhong, the deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Administration, who has taken his passionate defence of the city&#8217;s policies onto China&#8217;s most influential website, Sina Weibo. One of his most recent posts read: &#8220;It is understandable if people hate bad weather, but venting your emotions is not helpful.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The official line is that the smog in Beijing is merely inconvenient, while the US Embassy&#8217;s Twitter account sends out regular readings that conflict with the official story: It was a contest over smog that was being fought across two social networks in two completely different languages between two contenders separated by the world&#8217;s biggest [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,65,28,13],"tags":[733,432,443,269,310],"class_list":["post-12463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-environment","category-media","category-usa","tag-beijing","tag-diplomacy","tag-pollution","tag-propaganda","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3f1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12463"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12464,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12463\/revisions\/12464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}