There was a time when Beijing residents went out into the street without seeing the sun. Not because it was cloudy, but because the air was so thick that it blotted it out. That was just a decade ago.
Today, the same avenues that drowned a city of twenty million people are traveled by almost silent vehicles, the sky has a horizon and the birds returned to the trees. This is what happens when a city seriously decides to change.
The Chinese Environmental Miracle
By: Gabriel E. Levy B
There is an image that circulated for years as a symbol of modern environmental disaster: a group of tourists in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, posing in front of a giant screen that projected the image of a sunrise. Outside there was no sun. Only a thick gray cream that erased the buildings a hundred meters away and made the eyes burn.
It was January 2013, and the concentration of polluting particles in the air of the Chinese capital had exceeded five hundred units, more than a hundred times the limit recommended by the World Health Organization.
Doctors called it the Airpocalypse.
Today, that same square has a sky above it. Not on a screen, but for real: a blue that sometimes looks freshly painted, interrupted by white clouds and, in the background, the silhouette of the Western Hills, which remained invisible for decades under the smog.
Beijing recorded more than three hundred days with clean or acceptable air in 2025.
A local photographer who has been photographing the skyline from the same point in the financial district for twelve years recently published his images in parallel: those of 2013 are gray, opaque, without depth. Today’s have a horizon.
What happened between those two moments was not magic or climatic luck. It was a political decision sustained for more than a decade, with a central element that transformed not only the air but also the sound, the dream and the fauna of two of the most populated cities on the planet: to replace, in a massive and accelerated way, internal combustion vehicles with electric ones.
The history of Beijing and Shanghai is, before anything else, the story of what happens when a city seriously decides to change how it moves.
The war against smog
China’s air pollution has old roots: decades of accelerated industrialization, millions of combustion vehicles, and cities that grew faster than their institutions could regulate. In 2013, Shanghai recorded annual averages of fine particulate matter of around ninety micrograms per cubic meter. Beijing reached almost double. Both were among the most toxic capitals in the world.
The Chinese government responded in the same year with what it officially called the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Air Pollution, although in the corridors of power there was talk without euphemisms of a war against pollution. It wasn’t just rhetoric: Beijing shut down its last coal-fired power plant in 2018 and reduced consumption of that fuel by ninety-seven percent in twelve years. More than three thousand polluting companies were closed or moved out of the metropolitan area. Millions of vehicles with old engines were eliminated and binding targets were set for the electrification of public transport.
But the real breaking point came with cars.
China went from selling just over a million electric vehicles in 2020 to nearly thirteen million in 2024, forty-one percent of all car sales in the country.
In July of that year it crossed a threshold that few imagined so close: for the first time in history, more than half of the new cars sold in China were electric. By mid-2025, almost thirty-seven million new energy vehicles were circulating on its streets, supported by a network of nineteen million charging points. To get an idea of the scale: Colombia today has less than two thousand.
Shanghai was even more aggressive in its incentive policy. In that city, obtaining a license plate for a gasoline vehicle costs on average the equivalent of twelve thousand dollars at public auction. That of an electric car is free.
The result is that today ninety-six percent of the buses and ninety-five percent of the taxis in the city are electric. And the city has more than 1.5 million registered new energy vehicles, 71 percent of them purely electric.
A city that sounds different
The data on air quality is powerful, but there is one thing that the numbers do not quite capture: the way in which the experience of living in these cities has changed. Beijing reduced its concentration of fine particulate matter by seventy percent between 2013 and 2025. That equates, according to researchers at the University of Chicago, to an additional four and a half years of life expectancy for each inhabitant of the city. They are real years, in real bodies, in specific families.
But there is also something more immediate, almost intimate. Electric vehicles produce between one and five decibels less than combustion vehicles. On a busy street that may not seem like much, but in a city of twenty million people the difference accumulates until it becomes palpable. Those who walk the avenues of Shanghai today describe a new experience: that of walking along eight lanes of traffic without the constant roar of engines, without the smell of burning gasoline. Some areas of downtown have implemented restrictions on the use of speakers. In a top-tier Asian city, that would have seemed like a fantasy ten years ago.
People who have lived in Beijing for decades speak of that change with a mixture of amazement and relief. A thirty-year-old resident said she used to feel like she inhaled dust every time she went outside. Another, back in the city after years of absence, confessed that what surprised her most were not the new skyscrapers but the horizon: an intense blue sky with hills in the background that she had never seen from the center. The threshold of what is considered normal in a city can move so slowly that you don’t even notice it. Until someone arrives from outside and points out what is no longer there.
And the birds came back. Beijing today has more than five hundred species of birds registered within its urban boundaries, including twenty-seven under maximum protection. Species that had not been sighted for seventy years reappeared in peri-urban reserves. In the parks of the center, which were previously gray and silent spaces, the singing of birds was once again part of the daily soundscape. Biodiversity, which seems like an abstract luxury when the air stings and the noise stuns, turns out to be a natural consequence of cities that breathe.
The world that still breathes badly
While Beijing celebrated its regained sky, other cities received the title she vacated. New Delhi recorded an average of one hundred and eight micrograms of fine particles per cubic meter in 2024, the highest figure in five years and more than twenty times the limit recommended by the WHO. Thirteen of the twenty cities with the worst air in the world are in India. Chad, Bangladesh and Pakistan top the list of the most polluted countries on the planet, according to the latest report by IQAir.
Only seven countries in the world currently comply with the WHO air quality guideline: Australia, Bahamas, Barbados, Estonia, Grenada, Iceland and New Zealand. Ninety-one percent of the cities monitored in the 2024 global report exceed the recommended threshold. Air pollution kills more than seven million people worldwide every year, more than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.
But there are signs that the Chinese model is expanding. Oslo, Norway, reached a share of electric vehicles close to ninety-five percent of new sales in 2024 and reduced CO₂ emissions from transport by more than thirty percent. In 2017, Shenzhen was the first major city in the world to electrify one hundred percent of its bus fleet, more than sixteen thousand units. And Santiago de Chile today operates the largest fleet of electric buses outside China, with more than three thousand units, managing to reduce emissions from its public transport by eighty percent in the last decade.
What Latin America can learn and what it still needs to learn
Latin America is not in the worst category of the world ranking of pollution, but neither is it in the one where it should be. Bogotá recorded an annual average of ten micrograms of fine particles in 2025, the best result in its history and still double what the WHO considers safe. Medellín scored thirteen point four, with seasonal episodes aggravated by the geography of the Aburrá Valley that every year force the activation of environmental alerts. Air pollution causes between eight and fifteen thousand premature deaths in Colombia each year, with an economic cost of around one and a half percent of GDP.
There is real progress. TransMilenio today operates about 1,500 electric buses, one of the three largest fleets of its kind outside China, and is committed to being 100 percent electric by 2036. Sales of electric vehicles grew by two hundred and three percent in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period of the previous year. BYD, the Chinese giant that dominates the global electric market, already accounts for almost half of sales in Colombia. These are encouraging signs.
But the pace is still insufficient. Ninety-six percent of the vehicles that circulate on Colombian streets continue to use fossil fuels. The electric charging infrastructure has less than two thousand points throughout the country. And public policy still lacks the strong economic incentives that made the difference in China: there, making the registration of an electric car free was not a symbolic gesture but a lever for massive transformation.
The lessons of the Chinese case are transferable, although not identical. First: electrifying public transport has a greater social impact than subsidizing the purchase of private electric cars, because it directly benefits those who suffer the most from pollution and can least avoid it. Second, financial incentives work better than awareness campaigns when it comes to changing behaviors at scale. Third: the charging infrastructure cannot be a promise after the sale of the vehicle; it has to come first, or at least at the time. And fourth, perhaps the most difficult to replicate: we need a political will that does not change with each government.
Urban pollution is not a natural phenomenon. It is the cumulative result of millions of decisions: what type of bus is purchased, what license plates are taxed, which factories are closed, what is required of the industry. Beijing proved it in the only way it counts: by changing reality. Today its inhabitants can talk in the street without shouting, sleep with the window open, see the horizon from the center. Birds sing in the parks and the hills returned to the skyline. All that, which seems small, is huge. It is what a city owes to the people who live in it.
In short, Beijing did not clean its sky by praying or waiting for the technology to arrive on its own. He did so by deciding. Closing factories, changing buses, putting a price on pollution and leaving free what does not pollute. The result is not just an air quality index: it is people who sleep with the window open, children who play outside and birds that sing where before there were only horns. That is also governing well.
Main sources
- IQAir – World Air Quality Report 2024. Global PM2.5 data by city and country. iqair.com
- Air Quality Life Index (AQLI) / University of Chicago – China: National Air Quality Action Plan (2013). Analysis of impact on life expectancy. aqli.epic.uchicago.edu
- Beijing Government – Beijing Records Blue Skies on 95.3% of Days in 2025. Official air quality report. english.beijing.gov.cn
- SCIO (Information Office of the State Council of China) – From smog to sunshine: Beijing’s decade-long clean air campaign pays off. english.scio.gov.cn
- CnEVPost – Shanghai NEV ownership exceeds 1.5 million, 71% purely electric. June 2025. cnevpost.com
- Global Times – China’s NEV production and sales surpass 12 million each, leading globally in 2024 for 10th year. January 2025.
- ScienceDirect – On the impact of electric vehicle transition on urban noise pollution. Academic study, 2025.
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- World Resources Institute – How Did Shenzhen, China Build World’s Largest Electric Bus Fleet? wri.org
- Sustainable Bus – Santiago de Chile: fleet of electric buses and emissions. sustainable-bus.com
- ColombiaOne – Global Pollution Rankings 2025: Where Does Colombia Stand? March 2026. colombiaone.com
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- Mobility Portal – Electrified Vehicle Sales in Colombia Double Diesel in First Half of 2025. mobilityportal.eu
- Latam Mobility – Bogotá Expands TransMilenio Electric Fleet with 269 New Zero-emission Buses. latamobility.com
- ICLEI Sustainable Mobility – Clearing the skies: how Beijing tackled air pollution & what lies ahead. iclei.org
- Climate & Clean Air Coalition – Beijing’s air quality improvements are a model for other cities. ccacoalition.org
- The Nature Conservancy – A Place for Nature in Shanghai. nature.org
- ResearchGate / Science.org – Bird Biodiversity Increased with Urban Green Spaces in Beijing (40-year study). spj.science.org
- Damian Holmes – How electric vehicles are changing the sounds of Shanghai Streets. damianholmes.com
