AP Photo

Last Monday, a Beijing lawyer named Xu Xin tweeted a grey color block; the post went viral, shared more than 70,000 times. As Xu quipped, it approximated the view from Tiananmen Square, which was enshrouded in record-breaking haze.

Already garnering comparisons to London’s Great Smog of 1952, China’s so-called Airpocalypse is as much a political problem as an environmental one.