Silence from the Air Quality Twitter Accounts for the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Consulates in China

Several years ago, David Roberts, the former Regional Strategic Advisor for USAID-Asia, wrote about the impact of the U.S. Embassy and several U.S. Consulates in China tweeting out regular reports of pollution levels.

In 2008, everyone knew Beijing was polluted, but we didn't know how much. That year, the US Embassy in Beijing installed a rooftop air-quality monitor that cost the team about as much as a nice car. The device began automatically tweeting out data every hour to inform US citizens of the pollution’s severity (@beijingair). . . .

At first, the Chinese government pushed back and pressured the Embassy to stop releasing the data, saying that “such readings were illegal”. Fortunately, the Embassy stood its ground. Eventually, the Chinese government relented and began implementing an effective monitoring system of its own. By the beginning of 2013, it had succeeded in setting up around 500 PM2.5 stations in over 70 cities. Later that year, completing its about-face, China pledged hundreds of billions of dollars for cleaning the air and began to implement pollution reduction targets for major cities (now, like the embassy data, defined in terms of PM2.5).

I have personally found the information provided by the tweets valuable on a number of occasions. And the tweets proved useful to include in pollution-related posts here covering topics such as deceptive blue skies and children breathing hazardous air.

So earlier this evening when I saw some comments about recent pollution readings in China, I found it odd that I couldn't recall recently seeing any air quality tweets from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing or the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai, whose respective accounts I both follow on Twitter.

I went to BeijingAir's Twitter page and saw a straightforward reason. The account had stopped tweeting over a month ago on February 13.

With the curious exception of the last report, since February 7 the tweets are all of the "No Data" variety. One possible explanation for the pattern could be a problematic air quality monitor.

So then I looked at the four U.S. Consulates in China that also report air quality readings on Twitter: Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, and Shenyang.

Like BeijingAir, they all stopped reporting at the same time on February 13. And with the exception of GuangzhouAir, they all ended with a stream of "No Data" tweets.

Whatever is happening, the "single bad machine" explanation doesn't cut it. In fact, it appears all of the air quality machines are just fine. The U.S. Department of State Mission China website currently displays recent readings for Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, and Shenyang.

So the data is out there. And links to the respective twitter accounts still appear on the websites of the embassy and three of the consulates. Yet for longer than a month all of the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Consulate twitter accounts for reporting air quality information in China have been completely silent. This is a remarkable change.

I find it peculiar, at best, that I can't find any public explanation. So what's going on?