Summary：In this article, we collected the data of the air quality in Beijing over the past 5 years.We assumed that the significant changes or improvements in air quality were related to China’s two top Annual Sessions – the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress (CPPCC) and the National People’s Congress (NPC).Besides, there were several news and current affairs affected the air quality in Beijing. We will also take a closer look at its air quality at that time to see if there are significant pollutants reductions during those periods.

Four years ago, the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, said at the National People’s Congress and many more Chinese citizens watching live on state television, “We will resolutely declare war against pollution as we declare war against poverty”.

Since then, cities have cut concentrations of fine particles in the air by 32 percent on average. Just a few months before the premier’s speech, the country has released a national air quality action plan to require all urban areas to reduce concentrations of fine particulate matter pollution by at least 10 percent. As the capital city, Beijing was required to reduce pollution by 25 percent, of which the city set aside a massive $120 billion yuan to achieve this target.

All the statics in this project comes from Online China’s Air Quality , which is a public platform monitoring and analyzing China’s air quality covering statistics from 367 cities with AQI, PM2.5, PM10, S02, N02, O3, CO, temperature, humidity, wind scale, wind direction, satellite cloud picture and so on.

In this project, we mainly focus on Beijing’s air quality including AQI, air pollution category, and main pollutants such as PM2.5 during December 2013 to March 2018.

Continue reading →