A video of a water truck spraying water continuously towards an air quality monitor somewhere in Beijing was circulated on the internet. (Screenshot from the video)
A netizen recently shared a video on Chinese social media and pointed out that this is an air quality monitoring site near the capital airport, where a water spray truck has been spraying water towards the monitor all day, and it’s a diesel truck with a very strong smell.
Do you guys think your minds are better than the people in charge of the Beijing authorities, and that they can’t think of what you can think of? I think the detector must need moisture to work properly for some reason that we ordinary people don’t know and can’t understand. Which unit are you from, posting the video online to give the knife to the forces outside the country what is your intention ????? pic.twitter.com/hjg07sRJ9W
- Vinnie the Great (@realEmperorPooh) March 23, 2021
Netizens commented, “This is how Beijing’s air quality gets better.”
The video was posted on overseas social media Twitter, where some users ridiculed the water spraying as “some reason we don’t know or understand that we need hydration to work properly” and that the person who shared the video was “passing the knife to forces outside of China”. Another netizen commented that the water jet truck and the air quality monitor were clearly “insulting” to China.
Another suspected Beijing netizen said he only believed the data released by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Publicly available information shows that the U.S. Embassy in Beijing is located in the Chaoyang district of Beijing and has an air quality monitor inside the embassy to measure the PM2.5 concentration of the local air, which the embassy posts in real Time on its official Twitter feed.
On March 15, Beijing was hit by the largest dust storm in a decade, leaving the entire city in a dusky state. On the 20th, the dusty weather invaded Beijing again.
Beijing was hit by the strongest sandstorm in 10 years.
The sky is full of yellow sand in Tiananmen Square, like the “end of the world”.
Beijing was hit by the strongest sandstorm in 10 years, Tiananmen Square was full of yellow sand, Tiananmen Square and the Monument to the People’s Heroes were covered with a smear of yellow. Visibility in the city center has plummeted, with some people describing the scene as “the end of the world” and others laughing that a random photo taken in Beijing has become a famous painting of the Northern Song Dynasty #sandstorm #endoftheworld pic.twitter.com/19ZMlp7kIe
- Radio Free Asia (@RFA_Chinese) March 15, 2021
Back in 2016 and 2017, the mainland media repeatedly reported that local governments were using various methods to interfere with air quality monitor readings and create the illusion of “meeting” pollution standards. The city of Changzhou in Jiangsu, Shijiazhuang in Hebei, and Beijing have used water sprinklers or fog trucks to spray water on monitors to reduce dust, while the city of Xi’an in Shaanxi has stuffed samplers at monitoring sites with cotton yarn to filter the air.
The Chinese Communist Party‘s Ministry of Environmental Protection announced in 2016 that more than 2,600 cases of falsified environmental monitoring data had been discovered since 2015, involving air, water and soil, and this is not just the tip of the iceberg.
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