I was sat in one of Beijing’s growing number of Starbucks when I was first told of girl X.
The air outside was thick with smoke from the city’s coal fired power stations and I had taken shelter. A journalist friend handed me his phone; on the screen was an article from the People’s Daily about China’s youngest lung cancer victim – a girl who could not be named - from Jiangsu province. She was eight years old.
The pollution outside, an eerie yellow cloud, veiled the city, enveloping skyscrapers obscuring anything beyond the fifth floor. Girl X’s doctor had, without equivocation, gone on record at great risk to his freedom to declare that that very pollution was accountable for her condition.
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