Air Quality in China: What to Expect Now and What I Actually Do

Published 2026-11-09 · 71Asia Tours

My first Beijing visit, back in 2014, I stepped out of the airport into a sky the color of dishwater and assumed every day in China would look like that. Ten years and dozens of trips later, the view from a hotel window in the same city is often a hard blue with contrails. Both memories are true. The reputation has traveled slower than the air has improved, so a lot of first-time visitors still pack for a smog documentary and arrive to something much less dramatic.

This is not a lecture about pollution science. It is what I check, what I pack and what I do when the number climbs, for someone spending one to three weeks in the country.

What changed since the scary years

Between roughly 2013 and 2021, China did something few countries manage: it attacked its own air. Coal heating in and around Beijing was swapped for gas and electricity, and the car fleet went electric faster than anywhere else on earth. On paper, average PM2.5 in Chinese cities has fallen by well over half since the mid-2010s. On the ground, blue-sky days are now the norm rather than the exception, even in winter.

That said, it is not Switzerland. Winter cold snaps still trap pollution over northern cities, a few days a year still reach unhealthy levels, and March can bring sandstorms that turn the sky amber. The difference is that those are now events you check for, not the background condition.

How to read the AQI number

Every weather app in China shows an AQI, and the number depends on whose scale you use. The Chinese government uses its own index, which runs kinder than the American one. The same air can read "moderate" on a Chinese app and "unhealthy for sensitive groups" on the US scale.

I ignore the local number and check IQAir, the easiest international source, which uses the US scale. The thresholds that matter to a traveller:

0 to 50: clean. Go run along the river if you feel like it.
51 to 100: fine for everything. This is a normal good day in most cities.
101 to 150: sensitive groups should think twice about hard outdoor exercise. Healthy travellers will feel nothing.
151 to 200: everyone starts to notice. I shorten long walks and skip running.
200 or above: rare now, but it happens in winter. Mask on, museum or mall instead of the park.

When it is worst

Two patterns are worth knowing. The first is heating season, roughly November through March, in the north: Beijing, Xi'an, and anywhere with a real winter. When a high-pressure system parks over the region and the wind dies, pollution builds for a few days until the wind returns. Those spells are shorter and milder than before, but December and January are still when a bad day is possible. The second is sandstorm season, mainly March and April in the north and northwest, when dust blows in from the deserts. It looks alarming in photos and feels like a gritty wind; the AQI spikes, then clears within a day or two.

Summer and early autumn are the clean season nearly everywhere, which lines up with the best months for travel anyway.

What I actually do

Not much, most days. My routine:

Check IQAir the night before, the same way I would check for rain.
Carry one or two KN95 masks; they cost a few yuan at any pharmacy. I wear one only if the AQI is above 150 and I will be outside for hours. Below that, I do not bother.
Swap the long park walk for a museum or a mall on the rare bad day. Big malls and metro stations are filtered and genuinely pleasant places to wait out a grey afternoon.
Book a room with an air purifier in winter in the north. Mid-range hotels above roughly 400 yuan often have one, and the good ones all do. Asking the desk for a purifier is a normal request.

One thing I would tell my past self: do not let a hazy forecast cancel a trip. The bad days are data points, not the climate.

Who should take it more seriously

With asthma or any chronic lung condition, bring your inhaler and be stricter than I am about the 101 to 150 band. The same goes for parents of small children and older travellers with heart or lung problems. For everyone else on a two-week trip, the honest answer is that you will probably never consciously notice the air, except as a slightly grey photograph.

Altitude is a separate matter. Lhasa sits at 3,650 meters, and the air there is gloriously clean and much thinner. That is a question of oxygen, not pollution, and it deserves its own kind of respect.

City by city

Beijing: transformed, but keep an eye on December through February, and expect a possible dusty day in March.
Shanghai: the coastal wind does the housekeeping. Bad days are rare and brief.
Xi'an: worse than you would guess in winter, thanks to the basin and heating. Fine the rest of the year.
Chengdu: looks hazy much of the year, but much of that is mist and humidity rather than smoke.
Chongqing: the famous fog is mostly actual fog, and the AQI usually stays moderate.
Zhangjiajie: mountain air. The mist between the stone pillars is the attraction, not a pollutant.
Tibet: the cleanest air you will breathe in China. Worry about the altitude instead.
Hong Kong: generally good, with occasional roadside exhaust on busy Kowloon streets.
Macao: like Hong Kong, usually good.
Taipei: clean by any standard. Scooter exhaust is a street-level thing, not a skyline thing.

Arrange the trip around the sights, the food and the trains, not around the air. Check the number the way you check the weather, pack one mask, and let the sky do what it does. On most days now, what it does is cooperate.

Written by the team at 71Asia Tours, a China-based tour operator with licensed Spanish- and English-speaking guides. Browse all tours · About us · Our guides · Reviews · FAQ