It's all in the air

One of the most easily felt but deceptive issues in Shanghai and other Chinese cities is the air quality.

As Shanghai Environment Monitoring Center announced recently that the city had just witnessed a summer of the best air quality in its history, locals simply find it hard to agree with.

The reason is simple. The report stated that Shanghai's air quality was, by national standards, at the excellent and good, or first and second, grade throughout July and Aug; and, the air quality of 94.2 percent of the first 229 days of the year also fell under these two categories. Yet locals in the open often saw a hazy sky and breathed air that irritated people. The dust in the air for the past year is probably among the worst since there are thousands of construction sites operating in the city ahead of next year's World Expo.