While China is a beacon of economic and material progress, it is also condemned as a smog-ridden sweatshop. After all, China has 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, and with hundreds of new coal-fired power stations planned, things seem unlikely to get better. It is claimed that pollution makes living in Beijing equivalent to smoking 40 cigarettes each day. Despite frantic efforts to clean the city up in time for the Olympics in August, athletes still doubt the air will be fit to breathe. The world’s fastest marathon runner, for one, has threatened to drop out of the race because of pollution.

Can China solve these problems? Will its ambition in technical innovations help speed up solutions, or is the answer to ensure China fulfils its international obligations by curbing its hunger for energy and growth? Is there a whiff of hypocrisy when comfortable Western societies that were built on Industrial Revolutions moan about the birth pangs of Oriental industrialisation? Arguably, ‘Beijing’s smog’ has become a fearful metaphor for China’s economic development more generally. Is the rhetoric of environmentalism simply repackaging an old moral panic about the ‘Yellow Peril’?