Took a while to get here and post a comment, but I just really needed to. Pretty disappointing "journalism".
I'm a blogger in my spare time, not a journalist. I do not claim to be a journalist. This is a translation from a news story in a mainstream Chinese newspaper. Note I say that this is the paragraph that begins: "according to a story in the Beijing News."
But since you caption the picture with assurance that the air is really a little better, along with "swearing" that it's not the wind, you make it clear that you believe this to be true.
Here's what I wrote:
Beijing's air has been an eensy weensy bit better over the last month, and its not just because of the wind, I swear. Really.
My apologies for not turning up the sarcasm meter on my caption to "11".
A simple check of a pollution app that shows historical trends indicates that the pollution from the time the heat was turned on in 2012 through Dec 22 was actually quite a bit better than that same time period in 2013.
Please link to your source. My guess is that your app may be tracking the US embassy single-point AQI readings, whereas the source of the data in the article -- the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau -- uses a network of monitoring stations around the city.
If the story's wrong here, it's because the story's wrong in the Beijing News.
Right now it's the word of the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau vs your App. I have no reason to believe one set of data over the other -- you could say the government is engaged in a massive coverup, or you could say your app is using a different set of data or a different measurement standard or is otherwise inaccurate.
But given that the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau has not been inclined to cover up ugly facts (see our blog post Fewer Than Half of Beijing's 2013 Days Were Blue Sky Days), I have no reason to believe why they'd lie in this particular case.