A group of parents in my daughter's public school (she's in the second grade) were planning on buying an air purifier for her classroom. It was all discussed and agreed-upon, that is, until another group of parents decided they didn't want to pay, so they ran to the Ministry of Education and complained that the school was "charging extra fees."
So now the school is prohibiting any of the classes from installing air purifiers because they are afraid of getting in trouble with the Ministry of Education.
Needless to say, we are getting our daughter out of this school as soon as possible, but words cannot describe the ignorance and cowardice at play here ...
I think the media are at least responsible for this. I don't remember a few front-page stories from mainstream Chinese media confirming that the air is really that harmful to everyone's health or giving a guide on how to minimize the harm. Most of the stories either focus on reporting scrupulously on facts, such as specific rules, alerts and enforcements, or taking the high road in talking about dealing of the air pollution on the public policy level. Some media also use photos of extremely bad air to attract readers. But very few of them give clear and unequivocal headline story on how harmful the air is to everyone's health, and what exactly people should do to reduce the harm.
I'd like to think that if Beijing Evening News launch an interview with a specialist in the beginning of their 6.30pm news program who gives a clear suggestion to install air purifying devices in schools, and warns that breathing unfiltered polluted air would be very harmful to kids health, most Chinese parents would talk to the school to get a purifier in the classroom the other day.
But doing this might piss off the government. It's one thing to report on the fact that the air is bad. People generally don't react strongly toward generic descriptions of one thing being good or bad. But it's another thing to call on an alert saying that the air is bad, and it's very harmful to all residents' health. It's like if people are told that the subway system is bad, most of them would be like "oh okay who cares". But if you make it clear with evidence that the subway system has safety issues which have led to numerous accidents already, many of them would try to find out what's going on there.