Desperate to prove China’s enemies and critics right, I decided to search Google for a bigger list, which led me to Forbes.com where I learned that “all cities are positioned against New York, the base city with an index score of 100. For the Health and Sanitation Rankings, the index scores range from the worst on the list—Baku, Azerbaijan, with a score of 27.6—to the best on the list—Calgary, Canada, with a score of 131.7.”
Forbes used the Mercer Human Resource Consulting’s 2007 Health and Sanitation Rankings. As part of their 2007 Quality of Life Report, they ranked 215 cities worldwide based on levels of air pollution, waste management, water potability, hospital services, medical supplies and the presence of infectious disease.
In last place, number 25, was Port Harcourt in Nigeria. I then crawled through the list one page at a time to find cities in China and there were none. If you don’t believe me, see for yourself and click on the Forbes link and take a trip through the world’s 25 dirtiest cities in pictures.
Knowing China’s critics and bashers would be angry and disappointed and probably call me stupid, a liar and a China lover, I dug deeper struggling to find polluted cities in China that made the list—any valid list.
In September 2011, The Guardian in the UK reported, “Cities in Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia are among the worst on the planet for air pollution, while those in the US and Canada are among the best.”
China wasn’t mentioned. I was crushed.
Still desperate to find dirt and soot on China to satisfy its critics and enemies so they could bash her more, I turned to Worst Polluted.org, which used data collected over a three-year period from thousands of toxic hotspots. I then discovered that this site only listed the world’s top ten toxic pollution problems for 2011—not the worst cities. However, I downloaded the seventy-six page pdf document anyway and searched for any mention of pollution in “China”.
It looked like I may have hit pay dirt, or should I say toxic pollution, and started to copy and paste every sentence on those 76 pages that mentioned China.
Continued on May 20, 2012 in Searching for Impurity – Part 3 or return to Part 1
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
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