In Toxic Indoor Air in Nail Salon: Part One and Two, we touched on the politics that can be involved in the accessibility of healthy indoor air. A recent NY Times article, The Privileges of China's Elite Include Purified Air, highlights the same topic.

The article describes how ‘the homes and offices of many top leaders are filtered by high-end devices, at least according to a Chinese company, the Broad Group, which has been promoting its air-purifying machines in advertisements that highlight their ubiquity in places where many officials work and live.’

Beijing's air is notoriously polluted, and lately the city has been particularly polluted. The United States Embassy monitors Beijing's air and has registered unsafe levels of pollution multiple times recently. Interestingly, the Chinese government does not publicly release data on the smallest particulates in the air, those that are smaller than 2.5 micrometers. However, these are the most harmful pollutants because they can penetrate deeply into the lungs. Much of this pollution is due to vehicular exhaust.

While debates continue over whether and when to change this air quality reporting policy, Communist Party leaders don't need much convincing to obtain air purifiers that cost a couple thousand dollars: ‘To make their case, company executives [of the Broad Group air purifier company] installed [an air purifier] in a meeting room used by members of the Politburo Standing Committee. The deal was apparently sealed a short while later, when technicians made a show of cleaning out the soot-laden filters. 'After they saw the inklike dirty water, Broad air purifier became the national leaders