I live in Pittsburgh. The air is clean now and the water is clear - but there's constant reminders that it wasn't always this way. Although most of the historic buildings were cleaned of soot, a few chose to keep some parts sooty and black as a reminder of what once was - a great example is the Mellon Institute just a few blocks from my work (https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mellon-institute-columns).
It did take Pittsburgh a long time to start fixing its environmental issues, and it took the total collapse of the steel industry to fully clear the air. Even back when I came here (~2011) people had an impression of Pittsburgh as a polluted, industrial hell-hole - I'm so glad that it wasn't the case when I came.
The left image is, amazingly, a daytime shot - the sun is visible in the top-left corner. The smog was so bad on that day ("Black Tuesday", November 1939) that a camera essentially could not capture any detail _in broad daylight_.
Well, tell me why I wouldn't believe it. I don't have an hour to spare.
I lived in a communist dictatorship when I was young and pollution was definitely worse than the democratic country I migrated to. And while the general voting populace in america is much less environmental than I would hope them to be, it seems to me that once pollution becomes overwhelming and its health effects obvious and impossible to ignore, the general public usually does something about it.
In America it was the extreme smog and the acid rain that caused a backlash. But China got much much worse than America before there was an attempt to stop pollution, and the environmentalism was brought on mostly after the Beijing Olympics. I.e., it was the result of the reaction of foreigners to the mass pollution not Chinese citizens.
I still think China would be less polluted had it been a democratic country.
So from a sample size of one, you thoroughly concluded that this was because of democracy vs dictatorship. Just to offset that for you, India is a democracy with pollution even worse than China (although conveniently not often discussed in western media).
The conclusion you came to that China is trying to curb pollution "mostly" because of foreigners visiting during the Beijing Olympics, again do you honestly believe that?
You don't think the CCP, even being one of those "communist dictatorships", cares at all about lowered life expectancy across its population? Why did the CCP lift most of its people out of severe poverty over the last 20 years? What evil agenda was it trying to achieve then?
