Spatial Practices in the Space of Haze City

The Special Social Practice in Haze City

On a winter day in 2015, I traveled from Beijing to Nanjing on a high-speed train. The haze in Beijing had haunted me for several days and I looked forward to the long ride back to Nanjing so that I could finally break away from the besiegement of haze. However, while the train was racing on the rail, it struck me that the haze had kept me company like a shadow all the way. When we arrived in Jinan, the smog was even heavier than that in Beijing; after passing Xuzhou, we were navigating through the dense haze; and when we finally reached Nanjing, the haze seemed to have weakened, but the city was cloudy and foggy. This trip was a shocking experience that opens my eyes to the dire situation of environmental pollution in China. It forced me to recognize that most of the economically developed areas in China from north to south are almost entirely enveloped in the gloomy haze. The severity of air pollution and the size of its scope are unprecedented in Chinese history. Although this travel experience seems a bit incidental, the shock makes me feel that the production of space in many large cities in China has entered a new form: living under the haze has become the daily experience of contemporary Chinese urban life. Haze has completely changed our city image, spatial experience, and lifestyle.

China has experienced rapid development, thanks to 40 years of reform and opening policy and is now the world’s second largest economy. Industrialization and urbanization have boosted each other, the rural population has undergone urban migration, city territory has rapidly expanded; per capita income has significantly increased, and the housing situation has experienced substantial improvement. Nevertheless, in this rapid urbanization process, the problem of environmental degradation has become increasingly exacerbated. Since May 2013, the National Air Quality Monitoring Network has expanded its operation from 113 major cities to more than 338 prefecture-level cities and above, and the country has established a total of 1,436 air quality monitoring sites, watching over six kinds of major pollutants, including PM2.5 particulate. Take the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region for instance. The region encompasses 13 large- and medium-sized cities, including Beijing, Tianjin, Shijiazhuang, and Xingtai, with an area of 183,400 square km and a population of about 85 million. Located in the Bohai economic belt and nurturing industries of energy, metallurgy, equipment manufacturing, and electronics, it is one of the most economically developed regions in China. However, according to recent years’ air quality data, Shijiazhuang has the lowest annual air quality: only 52% of good air quality, which means that there is air pollution in the city for about half of the year. The second lowest is Beijing with the rate of 69% and air pollution for about one third of the year (X. Ma, Liu, Zhao, Tian, & Wang, 2016). This data demonstrates clearly that China now faces a severe environmental problem of air pollution.

Smog is a man-made environmental problem of air pollution, which affects human beings’ perception, cognition, and conception of space. According to Lefebvre, the space in which human beings exist is in fact a kind of spatialization (Shields, 1999), and spatialization includes three interrelated dimensions: the physical, the mental, and the social:

It is a question of discovering or developing a unity of theory between fields which are given as being separate. . . . Which fields? . . . First, the physical, nature, the cosmos,—then the mental (which is composed of logic and formal abstraction)—finally the social. In other words, this search concerns logico-epistemological space—the space of social practices—that in which sensible phenomena are situated in, not excluding the imaginary, projects and projections, utopias. (Lefebvre, 1974, p. 19)

Inspired by Lefebvre’s conception, I divide the spatialization of haze city into three dimensions: the physical, the experiential, and the social. Physical spatialization refers to the physical composition and change of urban space that take place due to the haze; experiential spatialization is slightly different from Lefebvre’s formal abstraction, referring especially to the subject’s perception and experience of physical spatialization. If physical spatialization is a kind of production of space, then the subject’s experience is a kind of production of space as well. Finally, social spatialization carries a wide range of connotations, and I would concentrate on one aspect of Lefebvre’s triad, namely spatial practice.

This article does not attempt to comprehensively discuss China’s environmental problems, but rather focuses on spatial practices in the space of haze city. In the triadic production of space by Lefebvre, “spatial practice, which embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 33). Furthermore, he points out that spatial practice consists in a projection onto a (spatial) fields of all aspects, elements, and moments of social practice (Lefebvre, 1991). Based on Lefebvre’s theory of spatial practice, I would develop a new triad focusing on the case of haze city and emphasize three dimensions of people in the space of haze city, such as experience, behavior, and discourse. Just like Lefebvre’s “spatial triad” (representational space, representation of space, and spatial practice), I propose another triad of spatial practice in which there are three closely related aspects. In my reconceoption, spatial practice involves residential or tourist-risk experiences, stress behaviors, and resistant discourse in the case of space of haze city.

Here I would further discuss an issue about the new triad. That is the dynamic interrelationships of three dimensions of the new triad. As I mentioned above, the triad of spatial practice in haze city consists of three factors: experience, behavior, and discourse. The experience of the triad is a process of directly perceiving haze space and becomes a source of knowledge or cognition of the environment. Therefore, the experience of residents or tourists in a haze city is quite different from that of those living in a clean city. More important, haze experience always influences and even alters people’s behavior. Facing a risk environment, the risk experience inevitably leads to various stress behavior. In psychology, it is agreed that stress behavior is a kind of defense response generated by unfavorable circumstances or experiences. Needless to say, haze space in city as a risk circumstance causes people’s strain or tension and even a variety of stress behaviors. If we define the stress behaviors in terms of the transaction between people and the environment, then we should pay attention to various discourses of meaning production arising from this situation. Generally speaking, such discourses on the haze space strongly demonstrate a growing discontent which produces a kind of “counter-speech” (Butler, 1997, p. 15) against environmental pollution.

It is reasonable to say that the space of haze city in China is a form of special spatialization concerning a kind of social practice. Such social practice is just so-called “spatial practice” defined by Lefebvre. In the case of haze space, I want to narrow “spatial practice” to the new triad, including risk experience, stress behavior, and resistant discourse. In the following sections, I will focus on the process of spatial practice in haze city from rick experience through stress behavior to resistant discourse.

The Logic of Visualization of in the Space of Haze City

As I have said above, the first of the triad of spatial practice in the haze city is the experience through human vision. Although visualization is not the critical point of reflection in Lefebvre’s theory of production of space, he still offers numerous links between spatialization, visualization, and spatial practice. He argues, “A further important aspect of spaces of this kind is their increasingly pronounced visual character. They are made with the visible in mind: the visibility of people and things, of spaces and of whatever is visualized by them” (Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 75-76). He discusses in particular the logic of the visualization of space:

It may be said of this space that it presupposes and implies a logic of visualization. Whenever a “logic” governs an operational sequence, a strategy, whether conscious or unconscious, is necessarily involved. So, if there is a “logic of visualization” here, we need to understand how it is formed and how applied. (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 98)

To illustrate his ideas, Lefebvre analyzes representation of space developed by Tuscan painters, architects, and theorists and focuses on perspective on which social practice bases. He reminds us that the vanishing line, the vanishing-point, and the meeting of parallel lines at infinity were the determinants of a representation, at once intellectual and visual. This representation, which had been in the making for centuries, now became enshrined in architectural and urbanistic practice as the code of linear perspective (Lefebvre, 1991). He also employs modern architecture as his illustration. He points out that the arrogant verticality of skyscrapers introduces a phallocratic element into the visual realm; the purpose of this display of the need to impresss is to convey an impression of authority to each spectator. So verticality and great height are spatial expressions of potentially violent power (Lefebvre, 1991).

Adopting Lefebvre’s logic of visualization, I would like to further develop it and explore visual experience in the space of haze city. It should be kept in mind here that vision is the most important of human senses because vision is a cognitive organ as Hegel put it. Heidegger suggests, we have entered an age of world picture by which he means to view the world as a picture, rather than a picture of the world. There is a good reason to combine vision and experience in spatial practice. That is to say that local people or tourists in a haze area always have directly visual experiences of smog surroundings. So visualization is the most prominent feature of haze as a weather phenomenon. The spatialization of haze city manifests itself more conspicuously through its visualization. Human perception, cognition, and experience of space depend on the visuality of space, and visibility is one of the most fundamental conditions of spatial practice. To put it another way, the experience of space is primarily a kind of visual experience of space, without which the construction of subjectivity by space would cease to exist. I will consider further how important visual experience is to constructing people’s recognition of haze space. I suggest that visual perception and its experience form the visual construction of space in a specific space leading their cognition and attitude toward space, which results in a corresponding visual ideology. This process constitutes the subject’s production of visuality in space. According to Foster (1988), visuality involves ways of seeing, which involves how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein.

In the following section, what I will examine is how the low visuality of smog space form a particular visual experience and how people response to their personal situations. In China’s existing scientific research, the haze refers to the horizontal visibility of air drops below 10 km due to the conglomeration of solid and liquid particles (especially PM2.5; Yu, Li, Deng, De, & Yuan, 2012). By this definition, an intuitive experience of haze refers to low visibility and the compromise of normal visual perception of space. In simple terms, the transparency and visibility of urban space disappears. For example, in a period from October 8 to December 7 in 2011, for more than 40% of the time, the atmospheric visibility of Beijing’s urban area was below 5 km (Z. Ma, Zhao, Meng, He, & Liu, 2012). According to Weather China, on December 20, 2016, the visibility in some parts of Beijing was below 50 m and that in the Capital International Airport it was 300 m. As a consequence, 169 flights had to be cancelled and multiple expressways closed (Weather China, 2016).

The phenomenon of haze is not something new in our daily experience. A common phenomenon is heavy fog. Nevertheless, heavy fog is only temporary, mostly at dawn or early in the morning, dispersing gradually as the sun rises. The haze, however, is quite different. It would last usually for a week or 10 days, until the arrival of the weather conditions (such as wind or rain) that drive it away. In other words, haze is an enduring meteorological condition. This has fundamentally changed the original experience and cognition of urban space by local residents and tourists, resulting in a brand new visual experience of a hazy urban space.

Due to the reduction of visibility, the consequence in terms of spatial cognition is the variation of urban visual form. Just imagine. As the air visibility drops below 50 m, many of the city spectacles that should have been in sight in under normal conditions just vanish before our very eyes. The Palace Museum, the Great Wall, the new CCTV Tower, or the Bird’s Nest Stadium, when enveloped by dense haze, present completely different visual effect which results in a unique visual experience. The following two pictures (Figures 1 and 2) are the best illustration of this visual experience.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The Bird’s Nest Stadium, December 20, 2016: A live picture with higlighted diagram.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

The Palace Museum under haze and under normal weather conditions: A contrast photo.

In his discussion of urban landscape, Moser (2012) poses an interesting idea of sensual fatigue due to information overload.

I, however, believe that the intrusion of haze has completely changed the spatial visual form of the city (such as Beijing), and its consequences are less visual fatigue than visual deficiency because many spectacles under the haze simply disappear before our very eyes. As a result, daily experiences and memories of the once familiar city become estranged and peculiar under the haze. This leads to a visual construction of space specific to the haze city and a particular visual experience of haze that results from it. The visual experience of space toward haze has not only changed the city residents and tourists’ impressions on the city but it also caused concerns about future environmental development and a sense of crisis about self-survival.

In analyzing Western representation of space, Lefebvre indicated the logic of visualization resulted in linear perspective. However, in facing haze space and its visual experience, we have to change Lefebvre’s logic of perspective visualization to a new one, namely, the logic of spatial disorientation and “compressed flat space.”

The primary feature of the spatial form of haze city is the disappearance of transparency and the sense of distance. The composition of the urban space that was once clear and transparent has now become a huge container filled with turbid gas, in which everything is blurred. The landmark structures or streets of the city can no longer be seen; the horizon in the distance vanishes; and the skyline that was originally the symbol of people’s memory of the city’s visual image is also obstructed. Haze has substantially changed people’s visual perception, blocking their lines of sight, which results in the following visual experiences. First, the sense of distance disappears. Generally speaking, people rely on distance to grasp the real world. Distance as a measure of the structural relation between objects is an important indicator in terms of establishing objects’ interrelation. Haze causes visibility to disappear, so that humans can see objects only close to them, but not far away. The visual experience of finding orientation in the city based on distance thus becomes ineffective. A resident who has long lived in a particular city can still use his daily experience and memory to compensate for his confusion about orientation when distance disappears. However, when first-time tourists visit a city in the haze, they completely lose their sense of direction and their ability to establish an overall visual grasp of the urban space. As a result, their memory of the urban space is next to nothing.

Second, the disappearance of the sense of distance means that the city turns from three-dimensional composition to two-dimensional composition. It may be possible to interpret the phenomenon of haze with the theory of perspective in the history of art. The so-called perspective is a representational method to create the illusion of three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional plane (“Perspective,” n.d.). However, since perspective depends largely on people’s daily visual experience, and since the ratio of length, width, and depth is an important visual experience in people’s daily experience, people’s grasp of reality depends on the experience of perspective. For example, objects or human figures are always bigger in the near and smaller in the far, and the close views are clear but the distant views are vague. From this point of view, perspective is not only a kind of magic that creates three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional plane but also a basic function for people to visually grasp their everyday lifeworld. The problem is when everything is obscured in the haze and the only things in view are what one sees in the front, perspective disappears from the visual experience of haze.

This situation is quite similar to the paradigm shift in the history of Western art. The Renaissance artists discovered perspective, so that two-dimensional paintings could vividly reproduce the sense of spatial depth of the real world, thus changing the direction of the development of Western painting. When it comes to Impressionism in the 19th century, especially Manet’s work, painting has increasingly turned to flatness and back to the spatial composition of the two-dimensional plane, which is particularly evident in the American abstract expressionist painting. The deep perspective disappears from the scene of painting (Greenberg, 1995). The haze’s reconstruction of urban space is quite similar to this shift in that, due to the haze, people’s visual perception of the city turns from three-dimensional depth into a plane in much shorter distance. Haze has caused people’s sight to be blocked, with the consequence that the city’s visuality of depth has been greatly compressed into a plane in short range. The obstruction and compression of sight has modified people’s perception of urban space, resulting in a unique visual experience. In the dense haze, a particular position or neighborhood is no longer a reference for the visual cognition at present, but only a marker on the map. Third, the haze has led to the disappearance of edge. Distance and perspective reveal the characteristics of spatial visual cognition in terms of the spatial relation of distance, but the disappearance of distance and perspective is in fact closely related to another important visual phenomenon—the disappearance of the edge. The edge refers to “[a] line which marks the limits of an area; a dividing line,” signifying the division and demarcation of different areas. In terms of human’s spatial vision, edge has a very important function. It demarcates the subject’s location and moving distance and also marks the spatial relation between districts and neighborhoods of different sizes. When haze fills the urban space, these edges of spatial district that can be visually grasped simply disappears, and people’s visual ability to determine the edge between districts thus disappears along with it. The haze destroys the determinacy of all objects’ contours and visual forms and the edges of various districts or neighborhoods, causing the edges of spatial division to be blurred.

Kevin Lynch (1960) once said that people rely on five elements to identify a city’s image: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. When haze is severe enough to submerge these identifications of the urban image, the city will lose its determinate function of constructing visual impressions. Submerged in haze, the city is no longer in its old normal state but demonstrates an estranged visual form. This is detrimental to a city, especially to cities like Beijing, which possesses a long history and a venerable image. The unique visual experience caused by the low visibility of the haze city not only changes the original visual image of the city but also changes people’s cognition of urban space. All the wonderful expressions of the particular cultural memories and literary rhetoric concerned with the city completely vanish due to this visual experience, which fundamentally changes people’s view of the city, causing its original image to be subverted.

The haze blurs visual references and time periods. Under normal conditions, the city often presents two different kinds of looks: that of the daytime and that of the night. Some cities show completely different looks and styles in the day and at night. When the haze hits, especially in severe haze conditions, the normal sunshine is so obstructed, the sky so dark, and the paths and neighborhoods so indistinct, that the lighting system has to be turned on in the daytime. Thus, haze produces a period that is neither day nor night. It blurs th rhythm of day and night, resulting in a conflict between people’s visual impression and their biological clock time. This may be the temporalizing of the spatial form specific to haze; its function is to confuse the time rhythm of day and night as well as people’s visual cognition.

It can thus be said that, due to its low visibility, the spatial vision of the haze constructs a different visual form, which contains various crises and inevitably causes people to experience cognitive disorientation and emotional anxieties.

The Patterns of Stress Behavior in the Haze City

The second factor of the new triad I have suggested above is stress behavior responding to haze circumstances. I would like to make some observations on the several patterns of such stress behavior and probe the relationship between people’s behavior and their poor surroundings.

In haze-prone areas, such as the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region, the meteorological changes of space have caused many social issues, including changes in the behavioral tendencies of people living in the haze city. This is a social issue that deserves close attention. The visual construction of the space of haze city contains a series of complex consequences behind the vision, which spawns a series of new behavioral tendencies and patterns. This is one of the connotations of the so-called “spatial construction of vision.”

Haze is a risk space that directly signifies air pollution and creates human health problems. Many studies have revealed the impact of PM2.5 on human health. One study finds that for every 10 µg/m³ increase in PM2.5 concentration, the rate of acute mortality, respiratory disease, and cardiovascular mortality would increase respectively by 0.40%, 1.43%, and 0.53% (Xie, Liu, & Liu, 2009). According to the research conducted by Peking University School of Public Health—“An Assessment on the Health Hazards and the Economic Loss of PM2.5,” an estimate of 2,349 deaths were caused by PM2.5 in Beijing in 2010, accounting for 1.9% of the total death number that year, and the economic loss amounts to nearly 1.86 billion Yuan; an estimate of 2,980 deaths were caused by PM2.5 in Shanghai, accounting for 1.6% of the total death number that year, and the economic loss amounts to nearly 2.37 billion Yuan (Pan, Li, & Gao, 2012). While obstructing people’s sight, haze has also brought greater dangers to the surface. That is why the visual construction of haze space is also changing people’s behavioral patterns.

In Beijing, urban residents pay a high degree of attention to haze. According to one survey, 96% of the respondents have clearly felt the decrease in spatial visibility caused by haze; 85% of the respondents have felt that the air has peculiar smell in haze weather; 96% of the respondents agree or fully agree that the haze problem of Beijing is critical, with 77.32% of them fully agreeing (Peng, Zhang, Luo, & Yanglu, 2016). When urban residents have such high awareness toward the haze, how does their visual cognition affect their behavioral tendency? One observable change is that residents of haze city start taking an increasing amount of “isolation” measures, to isolate themselves in indoor environment that is temporarily insulated from the haze air, or to simply flee the city when it is under haze attack.

One major feature of modern life is the timetable. For working-age residents living in a metropolis, time can be divided into three major parts: work hours, family time, and social time. To switch from one part to another needs the corresponding traffic time, such as going to work, picking up children, or visiting relatives and friends. In all three situations, a certain amount of outdoor time is required. Under severe haze conditions, one significant tendency of people’s behavior is to minimize the time spent on outdoor activities and to stay indoors as much as possible, to reduce the time and frequency of being exposed directly to the haze environment, so as to reduce the possibility of breathing in smog.

The motivation behind this behavioral tendency to reduce outdoor activities comes from two factors. The first is the emergency response measures issued by the government. During periods of severe haze that reaches the level of air orange or red alarm, local governments have taken a series of measures to reduce daily activities and restrict traffic. For example, from December 19 to 21 in 2016, when haze hit the level of a red alert, the Beijing Municipal Department of Education issued emergency response measures, ordering primary schools, kindergartens, the Children’s Palace, and extracurricular educational institutions to suspend class, and secondary schools (including junior high, senior high, and secondary vocational schools) to implement a flexible suspension of class. The Beijing Municipal Commission of Transportation mandates that during periods of heavy air pollution that reaches the level of a red alert, motor vehicles that meet the standard have to follow the odd-and-even license plate number rule (“Beijing issues red alert,” 2016). It is necessary for the government to issue a timely public notice. The release of emergency measures serves to persuade people to stay indoors as much as possible, while compulsorily ordering primary and secondary schools to suspend class, which substantially reduces people’s outdoor activities and strengthens their alertness and self-protection in the face of the extreme haze weather.

In the face of the severe haze, in addition to those official orders and emergency response measures that appear in the newspapers, individual isolation measures are more widespread. Individuals reduce their public and outdoor activities, close doors and windows, stay in office or at home. As a personal stress response to the risky environment, reducing the time and frequency of going out will inevitably lead to a certain degree of spatial isolation tendency. Although indoor space is not entirely effective in warding off haze, it is preferable to direct exposure to the turbid haze air. To keep the indoor space clean, a variety of haze PM2.5 testing equipment and air purification equipment become popular as a necessary installation for families to deal with haze. Due to urban residents’ concerns about the health problems caused by haze, and due to the decrease in their public outdoor activities and the increase in their isolation tendency, the city’s function has also changed. Lefebvre points out that the city has three most fundamental functions. The first is the informative function: the city provides various perceptions; the second is the symbolic function: the architectures, monumental buildings, or urban infrastructures constitute a social and cultural whole with symbolic signs; the third is the recreational function: the city provides the public with a variety of activities and games (Lefebvre, 1970). The city functions as the source of information changes due to the haze: public interaction and information exchange turn to indoor communication on the Internet; the symbolic function completely changes due to the low visibility, and the city image under normal conditions in the past now hides away; and outdoor recreational activities are significantly reduced and turned to indoor spaces, with many large-scale public recreational activities canceled or postponed.

It is obvious that haze has led human behaviors toward isolation, but to reduce outdoor activities and to stay indoors will also cause a series of other complex problems. From local governments’ orders to restrict outdoor activities to individuals’ internalized self-isolation, human beings, by reducing their everyday social and public activities, may also experience some new psychological disorders or emotional problems. Being isolated indoors may lead to mild depression. These complex emotional disorders may in turn lead to the increase of conflicts in workplace or at home, causing people to lose balance in behaviors and in mental status.

Parallel to the behavioral tendency of self-isolation is the tendency to flee the city in severe haze conditions, which is a new development that emerges in the recent periods of frequent haze attack in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region. People usually escape in two ways: one is to have a short-term travel when the haze hits, breathing in fresh air in other places, enjoying the sun, beach, and beautiful sceneries. People jokingly call this kind of escape “the escape-from-haze trip” or “the lung-washing trip.” Unfortunately, this kind of short-term travel is only a measure of expediency. People return to their resident city when the haze passes and the air turns clean. Another more radical act is to relocate the whole family in other cities where there is either little to no haze, which is an effective strategy to break away from the harm of haze once and for all. However, both “the lung-washing trip” and the family relocation process require corresponding material conditions and economic means. Therefore, the escape from the haze city has become a behavioral tendency with social stratification implications. Only the middle class and above are likely to afford the choice of fleeing the haze city, while for the lower classes, this kind of escape is nearly out of the question. Here are two examples. The movie star Zhang Ziyi microblogs the following words on November 26, 2016:

Severe haze again in Beijing. The adults can wear breathing masks, but no child is willing to wear masks. They feel suffocated and breathless. They resist instinctively . . . What can I do? Poor children! Indoors, I choose countless air purification equipment; outdoors, I have no other option but to take her straight to the airport. (“With money you can do,” 2016)

She took her child on a plane to the United States, and soon the microblog attracted heated discussions and criticisms. Many Internet users exclaimed: “Only when you have money can you afford to do whatever you want.” These heated discussions manifested the problem of social inequality: not everyone can afford the choice to escape the haze city. Another example relates to the effect of public opinion, that is, how to prevent the escape of certain distinguished persons from producing the “domino effect.” In recent years, many professionals have no other choice but to leave the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region and move to Hainan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and even some cities in the Southwest such as Yunnan and Guizhou. In the spring of 2016, a well-known scholar of communication studies at an established university in Beijing publicly announced his decision to leave Beijing for Guangzhou. This news was immediately interpreted as “going south to escape the haze,” and was discussed so heatedly on the Internet that it turned into a “media event” in no time. It is said that the protagonist of the incident received enormous pressure and severe criticism from the authority, which quickly deleted the relevant information online, to prevent the incident from getting negative publicity.

The haze-prone areas not only bring about local residents’ desire to flee but also cause a lot of problems for the tourists who come to visit. Take Beijing again for example. The image of “Beijing with a fresh autumn” depicted in textbooks of primary and secondary schools in the past no longer exists because of the frequent attack of haze. Haze arrives with autumn, and in winter the haze frequently visits, completely changing the look of the city. For tourists, the haze city is a dangerous place to visit. According to statistics, due to haze, in 2013, the total number of domestic tourists to Beijing decreased by 8.9% and that of the foreign tourists by 27.5%. Some foreign media have classified Beijing as one of the global travel destinations to be avoided in tourism (Peng et al., 2016). Leaving aside the rapid decline in the number of tourists, those who visit during the haze time not only feel concerned about their health but also experience disappointment and frustration in not seeing anything at all, thus feeling tedious about their travel and sightseeing. Studies have shown that haze reduces the scenic spots’ appeal to the tourists, damages the quality of the photos taken, results in a decline in the overall quality of the trip and causes the traffic to be neither safe nor smooth, all of which increase the difficulties and risks of traveling (Cheng, Zhang, & Fu, 2015).

For a very long time, since Beijing is the capital and the imperial city in history, Beijing citizens have developed a feeling of identification with the city and a sense of superiority. However, during the SARS epidemic in 2004, Beijing was among the severely afflicted regions. As a result, Beijing’s image and the self-esteem of Beijingers suffered an unprecedented blow. Late, as haze heavily affects Beijing, Beijing as the capital again suffers a serious blow. Living in Beijing was once the dream of many outsiders of Beijing, but now because of the serious haze, this dream not only becomes questionable in the eyes of the outsiders but also for Beijing citizens themselves. One study points out that every city has its own urbanity and its residents have a feeling of identification with their city. “Urbanity constitutes one of the sources of that feeling of belonging to a community personified by a place, in other words, an identity that is closely linked to the territory and its characteristics/distinctiveness, and becomes a major identity component”. As Beijing becomes more and more unfit to live in due to haze, the cultural factors that take pride in Beijing’s special political status and history form a sharp conflict with people’s self-protection of health. The haze has created a sense of frustration for the Beijingers. They have to endure the harsh environment of haze. In contrast, some peripheral cities that do not have the political, cultural, and historical importance exclusive to the capital, are now much sought after due to their clean water and blue sky. It is thus obvious that, due to haze, Chinese people’s approval and evaluation of cities have now undergone a subtle change.

The Resistant Discourse in the Space of Haze City

The last factor in the new triad of spatial practice in the space of haze city is a variety of discourses growing out of people’s emotional expressions. Although there are a lot of different discourses, the most distinctive futures of them are toward a resistant expression. China has very strict regulations and censorship system on the press. So people’s resistant discourses have to use multiple tactics in order to keep away from official censorship. In my view, the most effective tactics is to produce humorous expressions in the popular discourse by which a resistant humor culture against haze space has developed in China.

In discussing city image, Lynch points out that the analysis of city contains three components: identity, structure, and meaning. Identity refers to distinctiveness; structure refers to the spatial relation between observer and object; and meaning is another form of relationship, which is more complex and changeful (Lynch, 1960). Lefebvre poses a triple dialectic in the analysis of urban space, one of which is the so-called representational spaces. According to him, representational spaces embody complex symbolisms and are linked to the clandestine side of social life as well as to art (Lefebvre, 1991). If we combine Lynch’s views with Lefebvre’s views, we would find that the meaning of city image is embodied not only in the physical urban spectacles but also in the signifying practices of people who live in the city using various symbols. I believe that in the study of urban space, this embodiment of symbolism is as important as various physical spatial practices. This is an indispensable dimension of understanding the spatial practice of urban space.

As a serious problem of China’s contemporary urban environment, haze not only reconstructs urban spatial practices, forms a special visual form of space and people’s corresponding behavioral pattern, but also spawns a unique spatial culture—“the folk humor culture of haze.” This kind of culture is characterized by its comic style, which profoundly reflects the mentality of the lower-class people in a civil society under the authoritarian cultural governance. It resists ideological control in a variety of witty and humorous ways and evades the authority’s strict monitoring of the media, embodying certain characteristics of the resistance culture. The folk humor of haze shares some similarities with what Bakhtin (1994) describes as the carnival of the Middle Ages: “Thus carnival is the people’s second life, organized on the basis or laughter. It is a festive life” (p. 198). It forms a folk culture in opposition to the official culture. In a similar way, people in China suffering from the consequences of haze have formed a “folk culture of humor,” which employs humorous discourses and carnivalesque actions to engage in pungent criticism of the official discourse on the haze issue. The folk humor culture directly addresses harmful effects of haze, but in a more subtle and oblique way, thus carrying with it complex political and cultural meanings. As a subculture, it simultaneously reflects the helplessness and anxiety of people at the bottom of society about the environmental degradation in severe environmental conditions of haze, while it also serves as a way for them to release their anger and anxiety in a manner that produces therapeutic effects and restores mental balance in the face of risk situations.

One form of the folk humor culture is the realistic and symbolic use of the mask in the extreme haze conditions. For ordinary people, the simplest way to fend off haze is to wear a mask when going out. So masks become a necessity for people’s life when the haze hits. It is reported that for only 2 days—January 11 and 12 in 2013—China’s largest online shopping platform Taobao and Tmall received 23,000 mask orders nationwide for a total of nearly 500,000 masks. A variety of jokes and performance art about masks emerge one after another. Masks turn from a simple tool to defend against air pollution into a warning sign of environmental degradation.

For example, some people use the technique of collage to make the Chairman Mao portrait on the Tian’anmen Rostrum wear a mask, launching an acute criticism against the increasingly serious air pollution recently. This picture is widely circulated around the Internet, resetting the sharp contrast between history and reality. In Mao’s time, even though the level of China’s socioeconomic development was still very low, China’s environment was indeed pleasant, the air was clear and fresh, and haze did not exist. Now, times have changed. Even our wise and great leader would not be able to foresee that the earth-shaking changes occurring later in China would lead to such rapid deterioration of the living environment. He, if still alive, could not resist the invasion of haze either, and would have to wear a mask to prevent inhaling toxic air. This highly symbolic picture of the contrast between history and reality evokes people’s memories of the pleasant environment of Mao’s time and satisfies their nostalgic mentality, while, with the picture of the great leader wearing a mask, people are able to express their strong dissatisfaction with the present state of the environment, thus containing a kind of ironic humor as well as covert criticism. The protesting image of the great leader, compared with that of the general public, is clearly more influential and authoritative.

As masks gain popularity, their manifestation as a symbol goes far beyond the scope of its practicality. People or animal, living or nonliving, as long as they exist in the urban space of haze, can wear a mask to issue a protest. The statue of the former president of Peking University on campus was made to wear a mask. On Wangfujing Street, the sculptures that depict marketplace life also wear tight masks. Young people, while shooting wedding photographs in public places, wear gas masks as an exaggerated gesture. The newly weds are immersed not so much in the joy of being married as in their worries about haze, and these worries are not only directed at their own generation but also at the health of the next generation.

Another interesting visual image is a person who not only wears a mask himself on a walk but also gives his dog a mask. This performance art expresses people’s concerns about the fate of animals in a haze environment. Haze is caused by human beings, but it also exerts negative efficts on other species. If people can consciously protect against the haze, what can animals do? Has haze also deprived animals of their right to life? There have already been numerous studies on the impact of haze on human beings and there is no denying its relevance. Who knows the harm of the environmental degradation caused by haze has on animals? Perhaps the owner gives her dog a mask only out of her affections for her pet, but the interpretation of such a picture undoubtedly puts forward more complex issues. Therefore, masks as a cultural symbol of the haze period carries extremely complicated political, social, and cultural meanings. They motivate people to rethink the relationship between human beings and their environment. Haze blocks people’s sight, while people have to wear masks to block their contact with the haze air (see Figures 3-6).

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Figure 3.

Chairman Mao masked.

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Figure 4.

Masked statues in a Beijing street.

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Figure 5.

Wedding photo in haze city.

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Figure 6.

Walking masked dog.

Haze not only gives rise to significant increase of rich visual images but also produces various forms of literary expressions about haze. Apart from many literary works about today’s urban life that touch the issue of haze, numerous self-deprecating and ironic WeChat jokes reflect people’s deep anxiety about the haze. Through the use of humor these jokes alleviate this anxiety as well as the emotional disorders that come with it. Take a representative joke spread around group chats of WeChat as an example:

Haze is a macrocontrol measure that has eight positive effects on China:

This joke first affirms the positive function of haze, which lays down an ironic tone: fog is not only not a serious problem but also a new opportunity to solve many of China’s thorny issues. The first four issues are related to the livelihood of the people, such as social security, housing prices, aging, and so on; the next three issues are related to industrialization, such as the medical and air purifier industries and Internet development; the last one touches on the issue of national security. Haze has many benefits, so its rationality and legitimacy are ironically confirmed. This joke seems to describe the necessity of haze on the surface, but deep down implies profound questioning. Haze cannot solve the difficulties of livelihood, industry, and security, and it may also lead these problems to further deterioration. The writer cleverly describes the negative effects of haze as positive, as the cure for China’s current problems, enabling people to cry and laught at the same time while reading it. The joke hits two birds with one stone. While pointing out that China now faces serious problems, it also releases deep concerns about the haze crisis in an ironic and humorous way. Thus, it ironically produces what psychoanalysis describes as the “catharsis” effect.

Although such humorous expressions have some of the characteristics of Bakhtin’s alleged carnivalesque humor speech of the marketplace, it still has its own distinct features. In analyzing the humor of carnivalesque marketplace speech, Bakhtin (1994) points out that the marketplace speech incorporates many things that are excluded and forbidden by the official culture, thus forming a new language in the carnival atmosphere. However, I want to point out that the language used in China’s current folk humor of haze is not banned or excluded by the official culture. Its language and expressions are precisely those praised and normalized by the official culture. One featue worth analyzing is its unique rhetoric. It manipulates the correct expressions of official norms to convey implied meanings completely different from the expressions themselves, so that an incisive ironic effect could be achieved. The reason why this kind of irony is popular is, on the one hand, the reality of China’s current speech control, and on the other hand, its evolution into a unique Chinese-style irony that turns official speech into its opposite meanings.

Conclusion

Haze is a serious challenge that China’s development of urban space now faces. It is a man-made phenomenon of environmental deterioration that reconstructs a city’s spatial form to a considerable extent and gives birth to new experience, behavior, and discourse. In the spatial vision of haze city, the low visibility causes the city to turn from a transparent deep space into a turbid flattened space. People’s blocked sight leads to further defamiliarization of space. The spatial experience of haze intensifies people’s visual perception of the potential danger of haze, thus it inevitably triggers a behavioral tendency to reduce outdoor public space activities. Self-isolation or escape from the haze city also become realistic choices for people, which exacerbate social inequality of urban spatial rights. From visual experience and behavioral tendency of isolation, the folk humor of haze uses irony as its leading verbal and visual rhetoric. The ironic folk humor expresses people’s worries and resentment against the environmental deterioration, while it reveals people’s helplessness about the status quo of air pollution. Since it is difficult to form a grassroots environmental movement in contemporary China, the folk humor culture of haze carries a certain psychological function of self-treatment. In contemporary China, the tension between the recognition of the environmental deterioration and the expectations of environmental improvement is apparent. Since haze is a phenomenon caused by air pollution due to a variety of complex reasons, ordinary people are unable to figure out the cause of the haze, let alone controlling it. Therefore, their recognition of the current environment is associated with their worries about future uncertainties. In light of the tendency of China’s socioeconomic development, the management of haze would not improve substantially in the short term. But there have appeared optimistic signs. Xi Jinping, China’s president has declared in his state address: “Gold Mountain or silver mountain are not as good as clear rivers and green mountains.” Since he took office, the Chinese government has taken considerable measures to curb environment deterioration and control industrial pollutions and achieved some visible effects. In 2016, Chen Jining (2016), the Minister of the Ministry of Environmental Protection asserted that China’s atmospheric environment management has improved, especially in the Eastern and central regions. The situation of heavily polluted areas such as the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region have also shown signs of improvement. Nevertheless, the haze space of Chinese cities will for a considerable period of time continue to exist as a complex visual experience, a behavioral pattern and a resistant discourse. In environmental psychology, people have developed a certain kind of “resilience” toward the crisis environment or the traumatic situation. Adger, Brown, and Waters (2011) define resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks” (p. 698). Under China’s specific political, cultural, and social conditions, it remains to be seen in which way people’s “resilience” will develop. Will it disappear altogether due to the further degradation of the environment or because of environmental improvement? We can only wait and see.