BEIJING — Earlier this month, a U.S. study on the economic impact of China’s air pollution was released with little fanfare. Maybe it was because of the series of successive “blue sky” days we were enjoying in the Chinese capital, thanks to the gusty winds blowing down from Mongolia. 

The study, which was conducted by researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, breaks down costs that result from the health impacts from ozone and particulate matter, which typically lead to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

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The conclusion? “[D]espite improvements in overall air quality,” the cost of air pollution (as in lost economic productivity growth) in China has mushroomed from $22 billion in 1975 to $112 billion in 1995. But for at least one pair of 29-year old software engineers in Beijing, air pollution has actually meant greater economic productivity and a business opportunity.

A killer app
Wang Jun and Zhang Bin each moved to Beijing in 2001 to attend college.  Zhang, a Fujian native, was a math major at Beijing University while Wang left Inner Mongolia to study traffic infrastructure at Jiaotong University.

They met at a high-tech company, where for three years they worked together. Last year, they decided to strike out on their own and set up Fresh Ideas Studio.

“The primary aim … is creating mobile apps for solving practical problems in our daily lives,” Wang said, on a blustery (but sunny) afternoon at a coffee shop.

Last year saw some of the worst air pollution in Beijing since the 2008 Summer Olympics, spurring intense discussion among Chinese residents, teeth-gnashing among Western expats, and a near-diplomatic spat between the U.S. and China over fine particulate matter in the air known as PM2.5 that can wreak havoc on the respiratory system.

“Recently, the media and Weibo [a popular Chinese microblog like Twitter] users are very concerned about air quality, especially in Beijing,” Wang said.

In particular, there was a lot of online chatter about @Beijing Air, the U.S. embassy Twitter account that posts hourly Air Quality Index(AQI) data. 

The readings come from an air quality monitor that sits on top of the embassy in downtown Beijing, and they differ sharply from the daily results posted by the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP).

AQI values on @BeijingAir range from 0 to 500.  A “good” AQI  is 0 to 50 or what the Chinese call a “blue sky” day.  Unfortunately, many days in 2011 qualified as “unhealthy” to “hazardous.”  But on some of those same days, MEP data maintained the levels were “good” or “moderate.”  (The Chinese, in fact, claim there were 286 "blue sky" days in 2011.)

“The [Beijing] government says that nearly 80 percent of the days in the last two years met at least the Chinese standard and therefore had good or even excellent air quality,” Steve Andrews, an environmental consultant who has analyzed the @BeijingAir data, said. “While when we look at the U.S. Embassy data … over 80 percent days exceeded what would be considered healthy air quality and more days were hazardous than good.”

Andrews said that Beijing's pollution levels were "six or seven times higher than the U.S.'s most polluted city." "Air pollution at these levels likely shortens life expectancy by about five years," he added.

The discrepancy was due to the fact the U.S. embassy monitor includes PM2.5, a fine particulate matter measuring 2.5 micrometers in diameter that, according to the EPA, “pose the greatest health risks [and] can lodge deeply into the lungs.”

The Chinese data, however, only measured the much coarser PM10 particles.

“I’m a Twitter user and saw many Tweets about [@BeijingAir],” Zhang said. “Many Weibo users reposted the data, too.”

The software developers decided to try creating a smartphone application that based itself on the @BeijingAir data.

“Sometimes we can tell there’s a gap between what we feel and the data from the government,” Wang said.  “This is probably why many prefer the data provided by the U.S. embassy.”

In November, they released a 1.0 version, available only in Chinese and which came with simple but appealing graphics.  On good AQI days, the screen background was light and featured a hiking boot, indicating it was time to be outdoors. On bad AQI days, the screen background turned dark, an X marked the boot, and a person’s face wrapped in a mask would pop up.

There were iOS and Android versions of the app. Within weeks, it had been downloaded 80,000 times. At least half of those users checked the app regularly, according to Wang. 

Pollution 'ignored' in past
Under popular pressure that has been building since last year, Chinese environment authorities in Beijing have agreed to publish PM2.5 data. But they maintain the air quality has improved steadily in recent years. 

“We may have had bad pollution in the past, but people probably didn’t pay too much attention to it before so it was just ignored,” said An Xinxin, who works in the Automatic Monitoring Office at the Beijing Environmental Protection Monitoring Center. 

The Center relies on anywhere from 30 to 40 monitoring stations. “Almost every district and county in Beijing has its own station,” explained An. “So citizens in every district and county can know what the pollution in their own area is like.”

Like many of his colleagues at the municipal level, An pointed out that the U.S. embassy only uses one monitor. “[It] can only represent one spot at a certain time. Their spot might be very close to the road where there is a lot of vehicle exhaust, which causes a high level of PM2.5,” he said. “Our statistics are an average of Beijing as a whole, not just one spot.”

Zhang has lived in Beijing for more than ten years, but he said he’s not sure whether the air quality has improved or not. “I don’t know if it’s because now I pay more attention [because of the media and online discussion], or if it’s because the air quality has worsened,” he said. 

But he and Wang dreamed up the idea of incorporating both the Chinese and American data streams into their app.

On Monday this week, they introduced a 2.0 version that not only posts real-time data from the U.S. embassy in Beijing and U.S. consulates around China, it also includes data from the Chinese Ministry of Environment’s monitoring centers in 120 cities across the country.

Also available in English, the app has been downloaded nearly 5,000 times.

“We thought it was good to include both. In some cities, users might want alternative information,” Wang said. “If there were a third source for air pollution data, we’d probably include it in the app, too.”

They might also want to add Hong Kong to their list of cities.

This month, a local nongovernmental group said Hong Kong’s air is 20 per cent more deadly than the air in mainland China. 

Using data from Hong Kong’s own government and the World Health Organization, the Clean Air Network ranked Hong Kong ahead of mainland China, India, Vietnam, and Bangladesh for its high air pollution mortality rates.

More from msnbc.com and NBC News:

• Australia's 'dingo baby' mystery finally solved?
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• NBC's Kabul correspondent discusses Quran outrage
• Actress Lucy Lawless boards ship to protest Arctic oil drilling
• Hacked arms and legs display the despair of Somalia
• Michael Jordan sues for control of his name in China
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• Russians rally for Putin — and 2 days off work
• US pro-democracy worker stopped at Egypt airport

With additional reporting from Bo Gu and Ting Zhao.

HONG KONG & SHENZHEN, China – Anchor babies. Birth tourism. Cross-border births.

It’s a growing global phenomenon driven by Chinese with wherewithal and wealth.  Chinese from a China that – even as it continues to grow and open up to the rest of the world – still faces a restrictive enough present and an uncertain enough future that they choose to give birth outside of China.

Some do it to avoid the one-child policy.  Many do so for the benefits the child will receive as a citizen of the country into which it’s born: free or better education, the freedom to travel, good social services, a safe haven.

The United States is overwhelmingly the most popular destination for wealthy Chinese, a phenomenon covered by NBC News.

But a close second is Hong Kong, the tiny former British colony of 7 million people.

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Since its return to Beijing’s oversight  in 1997, and as China has made it easier for its people to travel, tens of thousands of mainlanders regularly head over the border to book up maternity wards at Hong Kong’s good quality and affordable public hospitals.

Of the 88,000 births in Hong Kong in 2010, roughly 45 percent were delivered by mainland Chinese women, according to Hong Kong's government.

The growing number of cross-border births isn’t just straining health care resources and the local population’s goodwill.  It’s also helped to provoke an identity crisis that 15 years after the handover has alienated local residents from their northern neighbors.

A business catering to pregnant mainlanders
For four years, Gordon Li has been running a business from Shenzhen, southern China, arranging travel to Hong Kong for pregnant mainland Chinese women. 

(*Gordon Li is not his real name; he did not want to divulge his identity.  Just last week, another agent from mainland China pleaded guilty to breaching Hong Kong immigration laws for helping mainland women give birth in the city.  It was Hong Kong’s first prosecution of its kind and, given the current mood, may not be the last.)

“We work like a travel agency [and] the fee depends on the client –whether they want to stay in a luxury hotel or a small hotel, etc.,” said Li, who charges his clients between a few thousand yuan and 20,000 yuan ($3,200) to navigate the system.  Most of his customers are from the mainland’s wealthiest regions like Guangdong, Zhejiang, Beijing, and Shanghai.

Li estimates that he has helped at least a few hundred mainland women to have babies in Hong Kong.  “Last year was the most,” he said. 

His early clients were trying to get around the mainland’s strict one-child policy, but today most of his new customers travel to Hong Kong because, Li says, there are “a lot of conveniences.”

The public health system in freewheeling capitalist Hong Kong is considered better and safer than it is in its communist neighbor.  Maternal mortality ratio statistics collected by organizations like the World Health Organization support Hong Kong’s reputation for good quality health care for mothers and newborn babies.

Other benefits for newborns include being automatically eligible for “the right of abode” in Hong Kong, which means becoming permanent residents.  Which in turn means unfettered access to free public education considered superior to that in the mainland; political freedoms; and ease of travel anywhere in the world.

And they are entitled to all of this without giving up their China citizenship.

In fact, more than 10,000 mainland Chinese children who were born in Hong Kong, but live in China, go across the border every day to attend school in the former British colony.

Hong Kong is fed up
Huang Lijuan is a 27-year-old kindergarten teacher from Guangdong Province.  She and her husband, Tsing Ho Nan, a 32-year-old engineer from Hong Kong, met in Shenzhen and moved to Hong Kong after getting married.

“I’m three months pregnant, and the due date is August 5,” Huang told NBC News one afternoon in a community center in Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong.  “But I haven’t been able to book a hospital bed in a maternity ward.  All of the public hospitals are fully booked.”

“There are 80 to 100 [mainland women married to Hong Kong men living here] who are pregnant, but they failed to book any hospitals to deliver their babies,” said Koon Wing Tsang, an organizer with the Mainland-Hong Kong Families Rights Association.  Like Huang, they are all casualties of recent restrictions on non-local women.

Under popular pressure, the Health Authority (HA) in Hong Kong has instituted quotas for non-local residents.  Currently, only 3,400 births by non-local women are permitted at public hospitals this year – down from 10,000 in 2011.  Private hospitals are allowed 31,000 births by non-local women.

“The government and the HA are committed to ensuring that local pregnant women will be given priority in the use of the services over non-Hong Kong residents (non-eligible persons, NEPs),” said a Health Authority spokesman in a written response to NBC News requests for an interview.

But even the new quotas may not be enough.  As Huang found out, all the maternity wards in Hong Kong’s public hospitals – and many private clinics – are fully booked until September. 

Moreover, the quotas don’t prevent mainland women from using the emergency wards as a last resort.  More than 1,600 such births last year were delivered in Hong Kong’s emergency rooms – an unnecessary medical risk since such wards are not equipped or staffed properly for deliveries.

Some Hong Kong government officials have raised the possibility of an outright ban on mainland Chinese women giving birth in the city, but critics have argued enforcement is problematic. 

Others have suggested ending the practice of granting automatic permanent residency status to babies born to non-local parents.  To do so, according to legal experts as well as Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Donald Tsang, would mean having to reinterpret the Basic Law – the territory’s mini-constitution. 

Any such action would require consultations with Beijing, which could prove to be a political minefield for Hong Kong, which prides itself on its Western-style democratic values.

China to ban names that signal 'orphan' status

'Locusts' & 'running dogs'
Adding fuel to the fire is a recent series of tense confrontations between local and mainland residents.

Last month, Hong Kong citizens were outraged over a report that a Dolce & Gabbana boutique had banned local shoppers from taking photographs of its shop, but allowed mainland Chinese tourists and other visitors to snap away.  A Facebook campaign days later galvanized more than a thousand people to protest outside the shop, forcing it to shut early.

Barely a week later, a heated dispute broke out on the Hong Kong subway when a mainland Chinese child was asked to stop eating on the train – a practice banned in the territory.  The argument between locals and mainlanders was captured by a cell phone camera, and the video went viral on the Internet.

Tensions were further inflamed by comments from a Peking University professor, who when shown the video of the subway dispute, called the territory’s residents “running dogs of the British imperialists.”

This month, a group of concerned Hong Kong citizens bought a full-page ad in a popular mainstream Chinese-language Hong Kong daily newspaper that called mainland visitors “locusts.”  The term refers to the large numbers overrunning the territory to consume all its resources.

A “locust” song even made the rounds on the Internet, with spiteful lyrics poking fun at mainland Chinese, and inspiring at least one group of young Hong Kong men to roam around singing the song at visiting mainland Chinese.

An identity crisis
“I think the real reason that Hong Kong people are upset is because they feel helpless politically,” said Wen Yunchao, a mainland blogger and activist now living in the territory.  “The rules they believe in are being broken by all these mainland visitors, and yet they still have to rely on China economically.”

Dr. Elaine Chan at the Center of Civil Society and Governance at Hong Kong University agrees the tension is “a manifestation of something deeper.”

“Hong Kong people do not have a very positive view of mainlanders,” she said.  “Not just because they are buying properties and not just because they are buying all the luxury goods.  But also because of how they carry themselves.”

Both Wen and Chan argue there’s an underlying sensitivity to and awareness of the fact that Hong Kong is bound up with China –culturally, historically, politically, and economically – and yet there remains a gap in fundamental values between the two: in terms of the rule of law or basic civility.  That tension makes some people in the territory uncomfortable.

For now, Beijing has remained silent at least on the cross-border births issue, although authorities in neighboring Guangdong province have promised to find a solution.

But another hot-button topic may soon eclipse that of birth tourism.  The main topic of conversation last week was a government proposal to open up the border to mainland Chinese drivers and their vehicles.  Concern over road safety issues is so great in Hong Kong that an online petition has already gathered 7,000 signatures.

With additional reporting by Bo Gu.

BEIJING—It was a good and a bad weekend for Chinese in America. 

And one that so far seems to have gone pretty much unnoticed amongst Chinese in China.

On Saturday night, the New York Knicks’ third-string point guard, Jeremy Lin, dribbled and soared into the hearts of hometown fans.  He led the shambolic team to a tight victory over the New Jersey Nets, scoring 25 points and seven assists in 36 minutes.

The New York Times said Lin’s performance “ignited an instant love affair with New York.” 

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The New York Daily News ran a headline online, “It’s Lin-sanity!”

Lin, a California native whose parents are from Taiwan, was perhaps better known previously as being an Ivy League graduate--one of only 40 such players in the N.B.A.  He’s a member of Harvard University’s Class of 2010.

But for many of his fans, it’s been more notable that he’s the first Chinese-American to play in the N.B.A.

A great moment for Asian-Americans until the Superbowl, when a controversial campaign ad by U.S. Senate Republican candidate Pete Hoekstra ran against his opponent, Michigan incumbent Debbie Stabenow.

The ad features a young Asian woman riding on a bicycle against a rice paddy.  She stops to speak to the camera in broken English, “Debbie spend so much American money, you borrow more and more for us.  Your economy get very weak, ours get very good.  You get our jobs.”

Just in case it wasn’t clear, the website, debbiespenditnow.com, features the China flag and what one Twitter user called “chop suey” font.  The message being that U.S. government officials like Stabenow are spending so much money that it benefits China, which is why America is in this economic mess now.

Criticism came swiftly on Twitter from American expatriates living in China, many of whom called the commercial "racist."

But so far there’s been virtually no reaction on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, to either phenomenon.

As my Chinese colleague, Bo Gu, noted, Hoekstra’s ad didn’t make any sense to her.  “It was just like that time with the Spanish basketball team.”

She was referring to a 2008 photo advertisement for which the Spanish national basketball team posed, each player pulling their eyes to make them look slanted.  The ad -- which emerged just before the Beijing Olympics -- provoked an uproar in the U.S. among Asian-American groups, but it was shrugged off by Chinese in China.  Most didn't understand the gesture; those who did found it amusing or flattering.

BEIJING—Here's a little diversion for anyone needing a little break from sports this weekend (Superbowl, anyone?  Jeremy Lin, anyone?). 

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It's a chirpy version of that 1980s A-ha standby, “Take On Me,” performed by…

Accordion players.

In North Korea.

The five musicians were filmed at the Kum Song School in the capital, Pyongyang, in December last year.

They were introduced to the A-ha song by visiting Norwegian artist Morten Traavik, who had been travelling to and from North Korea as part of efforts to bring musicians and artists from the isolated country to Norway for an arts and culture festival this month.

According to one report, the accordion players surprised Traavik with their improvised version of the Euro-pop song two days after he presented them with the CD.  He then filmed them playing the song and posted it on YouTube to promote the festival, which runs from February 8-12. 

BEIJING — Just short of four years ago, NBC News tried to cover an outbreak of violence in a Tibetan community in remote western Sichuan Province. 

The drive from the capital Chengdu took thirteen hours, but my colleague and I were turned away just a few dozen miles away from our destination, Aba.  We had run into a lone Chinese police roadblock set up around a bend in the road, blocked from our view by a hill.  A four-hour standoff with local authorities ensued as the police unsuccessfully tried to view—and seize--our videotapes.

Even back then, the challenge of trying to report from a harsh region that was being sealed off by the Chinese government was formidable, and we found ourselves relying on secondhand reports.  Twitter was still in its infancy; its Chinese equivalent Sina Weibo did not even exist. 

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But BlackBerries did.  Impressively there was reception on the Tibetan Plateau in Sichuan, enabling us to read a stream of emailed reports from exiled Tibetan groups alleging Han Chinese atrocities being committed against Tibetans inside Aba.  But without being able to enter the area or being able to talk to residents, we could not verify any of the stories.

Fast forward four years later, not much appears to have changed.  Once again, foreign journalists are unable to report in the area, and secondhand reports are the norm.

However, the crackdown taking place across China’s Tibetan communities is not so much just another stage of a cycle that’s repeating itself as it is perhaps growing evidence that March 2008 was a turning point.

A watershed moment
“The region has never recovered from the 2008 repression,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch who monitors the region. 

“That really was a turning point.  We’re still in the aftermath of this very, very severe repression that took place in 2008….  Over the years, [Chinese officials] have shifted from trying to gain the consent of the Tibetan people to basically riding roughshod.”

Following a year of Tibetans--mostly monks and nuns--setting themselves on fire, the western half of Sichuan, once part of the Himalayan kingdom, finds itself ringed with checkpoints. 

“The Chinese authorities have set up a massive security cordon in an attempt to prevent journalists from entering Tibetan areas in Western Sichuan Province where major unrest – including killings and self-immolations – has been reported,” said the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) in an emailed statement on Thursday.

The cordon, continued the FCCC statement, is “a clear violation of China’s regulations governing foreign reporters, which allow them to travel freely and to interview anyone prepared to be interviewed.”

Foreign camera crews have been harassed and their Chinese colleagues intimidated and threatened.  Attempts to enter the region by car, taxi, or even on foot have been blocked; local authorities have used excuses such as “bad weather” or “dangerous conditions” to keep outsiders from proceeding.

Security is also tight in neighboring Qinghai Province, also once part of the Tibetan kingdom.  Meanwhile, security forces the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) are on high alert, with troops fanning out across the capital Lhasa.  There appears to be as much concern about preventing information about what’s happening inside the Tibetan areas from leaking out as there is about containing any opposition to Beijing.

“We have had pretty consistent reports of the gearing up of security measures that are taken there,” said Bequelin.  “Lhasa is basically a garrison town now.”

A murky future

Reports of the crackdown have been cast against the backdrop of several upcoming events: the Tibetan New Year, the anniversary of the March 10, 2008, protests, and the Chinese Communist Party Congress.  The party congress, which takes place every five years, is an especially sensitive event this time as it will usher in a massive leadership changeover.

But Beijing has also painted itself into a corner.

“The government has no room for compromise, because they insist on this depiction of the reality that is absurd,” said Bequelin.  A reality, he continued, that claims that Tibet is a harmonious place populated by happy Tibetan people grateful for the economic growth Beijing has brought them.

Indeed, state-run media contend the unrest in Tibetan regions is due to a handful of bad foreign elements. 

The Global Times ran an article today that quoted a local Tibetan policeman describing a recent outbreak of violence in Sichuan Province “as a result of a few separatists in and outside of China plotting riots and instigating the mostly non-political Tibetan residents to follow them.”

Like the security forces in the Tibetan areas, this narrative has remained constant, and according to many observers it risks preventing Beijing from understanding the real challenges they face.    

BEIJING—Last week, the New York Times published a report about working conditions at factories producing Apple products in China.  Under the spotlight was Foxconn Technology, a key manufacturer for Apple and “China’s largest exporter and one of the nation’s biggest employers, with 1.2 million workers,” responsible for churning out tens of millions of iPhones and iPads sold around the world.

The article focused specifically on Foxconn’s Chengdu factory, where employees have complained about nonstop shifts, arduous overtime, crowded dormitories, mental health (nearly twenty workers at Foxconn have committed suicide over two years), and a hazardous working environment that's led to at least one explosion, in May 2011.

The New York Times report was also published in Chinese in the well-respected business and economic news weekly Caixin, where Chinese readers could post comments in response to the story. 

Since it was released over the Lunar New Year festival, a week-long holiday which brings the country to a rare standstill, reaction seemed relatively muted.  As we write this, there were 650 comments on Caixin’s Weibo page (a Twitter-like Chinese microblog)--compared to the 1,770 comments on the Times’ website. 

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A cynical reaction in China
On Caixin’s Weibo site, some of the comments condemned Apple’s corporate practices, but many also criticized the Chinese government for failing to protect its own citizens.

“Labor protection and social security is not only the responsibility of corporations.  If the government had regulations and supervised the corporations, then they cannot be that irresponsible,” wrote one person. 

A significant number also captured a sentiment that was cynical but perhaps very pragmatic of many Chinese: 

“If they don’t work for Apple, those workers don’t have anywhere to shed their sweat and blood.”

“Why not kick Apple out?  Tens of thousands of people will lose their jobs.“

“They are criticizing Apple only, because Apple is a huge target.  The migrant workers hired by state-owned enterprises here can hardly be as good as Apple’s.  Take care of your own workers before you pay attention to other people’s suppliers.”

All of which was bolstered by something this week that explains--in part--why the response in China might not be as outraged as those in the West might expect.

Workers want those jobs
On Monday, tens of thousands of people lined up outside a job agency to apply for an estimated 100,000 new jobs Foxconn is seeking to fill at its factory in Zhengzhou, the capital of central Henan province. 

Foxconn wants to double its current workforce of 130,000 at the Zhengzhou plant, which it opened last year.  The facility already churns out 200,000 iPhones a day and is part of Foxconn’s grand plan to make Zhengzhou the world’s largest smartphone manufacturing base.

The basic starting salary advertised--according to a report posted on M.I.C. Gadget, a blogsite about tech and other related matters in China—is 1,650 yuan a month ($261), which includes dorm housing and food.

The pay is lower than comparable salaries Foxconn pays workers at its Shenzhen factory in southern China.  But that may be a sacrifice Henan workers are willing to make initially. 

With a population in excess of 100 million, Henan is China’s most populous province.  A fifth of them are migrant workers who travel widely to find jobs in the country’s more prosperous regions like the south or coast.

With additional reporting from Bo Gu.

BEIJING – Wenzy Duan dreams about becoming a delegate to the United Nations.

“I know this [ambition] is pretty high,” said the 17-year old Beijing native.  “But I think I can give it a shot.” 

To prepare, Duan wants to study international relations at an American college – someplace like the University of Washington. “I hear [it] is good at social science," she said.

The University of Washington is one of approximately 10 U.S. universities Duan plans to apply to in the coming year with the help of an education consultant she hired last summer.

“I know that the scores is not the only thing that the university will consider whether you can get in or not,” said the high school senior.

Duan is not alone.  Today, China sends more of its students to America than any other country. During the 2010-11 academic year, 157,588 Chinese students were studying in the U.S. – an increase of 23 percent from the previous year, according to the Institute of International Education. 

The growing market of Chinese students wanting to go to the U.S. has created various cottage industries in China and the U.S. –  among them are education consultants who help students navigate the maze of college applications and "brokers" representing American universities who seek student candidates paying full tuition. But it's also fueled anxiety among American students and their parents about increased competition from abroad.

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Education consultants: the main cottage industry
“When [Chinese students] decide to come to the U.S. and study in the U.S. school, they have no idea,” said Steven Ma, president of ThinkTank Learning, the consulting group with which Duan is working.  "What do colleges in the U.S. look for anyway?  What do they want?  What type of students they want?  And that’s where we come in.”

ThinkTank Learning, based in Santa Clara, Calif., offers tutoring and college counseling.  Most of the students contracting its services have been Asian-American, but Ma said increasingly his firm began fielding calls from mainland Chinese families wanting their advice. 

Eventually ThinkTank Learning opened a branch in Shenzhen in 2009 and then in Beijing a year later.  It charges anywhere from $17,000 to almost $40,000 for tailored consultation packages lasting six to 12 months, dispensing advice on choosing the right schools, writing essays, or preparing for interviews.  

“They’ll just tell you when you need to get something done by what deadline and how do you prepare your application to the school’s standards,” said Julia Yin, Duan’s mother, a petroleum engineer who hails from Hunan province.  “Basically, everything is DIY [do it yourself.]"

Go West, Young Man (and Woman)
China sent its first student to an American college in 1850: A native of Guangdong Province named Yung Wing earned his degree from Yale University, paving the way for thousands more over the following century.

The flow of students from China to America dried up in the 1950s when the establishment of the People’s Republic of China gave way to tumult and isolation, and did not re-start until 1974 1978.

From then until just a few years ago, "It was almost all graduate students, most of them funded by the host universities through research assistantships or teaching assistantships," said Peggy Blumenthal, senior counselor to the president at the Institute of International Education (IIE).

Now, Chinese undergraduates drive the growth, particularly in the past two years.  At the start of the 2006-07 academic year, 9,955 Chinese undergrads were enrolled in U.S. schools. The following year, that figure jumped to 16,450.  By the 2010-11 academic year, 56,976 undergraduates made up a third of all Chinese students living in the U.S.

“What you’re seeing is the growth of the middle class of China who can really afford to send their kids to the U.S.,” said Blumenthal.  “The Chinese undergrads are all coming virtually self-funded.”

The fact that so many students pay their own way has not gone unnoticed.

"Foreign students spend about $21 billion a year in the U.S. in tuition and living expenses for them and their families,” said Charles Bennett, Minister-Counselor for Consular Affairs at the U.S. embassy in Beijing – where Ambassador Gary Locke has made among his top priorities the expansion of visa processing capacity in China.

“That’s a very large sum of money for U.S. academic institutions,” continued Bennett, especially as so many face shrinking endowments or reduced state funding.

The Chinese comprise at least 21 percent of all international students newly enrolled in American schools, which means that they and their families contribute roughly $4 billion to the American economy, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Edging out American students in America?
Recent reports, however, have suggested mainland Chinese students and their ability to pay full tuition are costing American students placement in American colleges. A bankrupt state school system in California – one of the most popular destinations for Chinese students – has meant that its well-regarded schools are seeing record enrollments from out-of-state and international students. 

For the 2010-11 academic year, California welcomed the most international students – 96,535. And for the tenth year in a row the University of Southern California was the leading host U.S. institution for overseas students, enrolling 8,615, according to the IIE.

But the IIE argues adding mainland Chinese students is helpful for diversity.  “Most Americans will not study abroad. On the other hand, their careers will be global,” observed Blumenthal.  “They need to learn how to interact with professionals from other countries, and many of them will be from China.  There are very few industries or business not affected by China.”

Moreover, at the graduate level, Chinese students aren’t competing against American students for a seat in the classroom, according to Blumenthal.  “There still aren’t enough Americans in the pipeline wanting to get graduate training in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math,” she said.

But detractors note other challenges have surfaced as a result of so many Chinese students going to U.S. schools.  Among them is whether some applicants from the mainland are cheating their way into admissions by falsifying their academic records or achievements. 

One consulting company in Beijing that works U.S. universities, Zinch China, says 90 percent of Chinese undergraduates submit false recommendation letters for their U.S. college applications and that 70 percent enlist someone else to write their essays.

The dishonesty works the other way, too.  A growing number of “education brokers,” who work on behalf of U.S. institutions to solicit Chinese students, have led to misrepresentations and predatory fees, according to a revealing report from Bloomberg News. Some agents promise admission to top-flight schools, charge exorbitant fees, in some instances including a portion of scholarship funds, and students can end up at schools that are a far cry from the "dream schools" they hope to attend.  

Can China produce innovative thinkers?
The desire among Chinese students to seek an American college degree has grown stronger over the years owing to a number of factors.

Above everything else, there is the fierce competition for gaining admissions to a preeminent Chinese university. The selection process is decided solely by the gaokao, an annual national college entrance examination that lasts nine grueling hours over two to three days.

This past year, more than 9 million students across China took the gaokao.  And believe it or not, that number has been declining since 2008 as more students opt out of the gaokao and sign up for exams like the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) and the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test), both of which are generally prerequisites for applying to any U.S. college or university.

A lively debate is growing about whether China’s education system can produce innovative thinkers who can enable the country to lead – not just catch up with or follow in the footsteps of industrialized economies like the U.S. or Britain. Such concerns triggered a widespread discussion online when Steve Jobs died earlier this year.

“The students here are not as robotic as Americans think,” said Gene Hwang, a 27-year-old Taiwanese-American, who has been working in China for ThinkTank Learning for almost two years.  “But they are held back by some of the systems in schools, which emphasize rote memorization….  We work with them on [developing] critical thinking.”

Broadening those horizons
“When I get into America, I can get [a liberal] education [that] could open my mind,” said Zhang Yuqi, a soft-spoken but intense 17-year-old high school senior.

He’s been working with a ThinkTank Learning consultant for three months, reviewing which schools to apply to and working on his essays.  A possible math major, he has his eye on Carnegie-Mellon and Emory where he hopes to find a climate that differs from his elite Beijing high school, which he says has too many “planned activities.”

Duan wants to study in the U.S., because “they accept all different kinds of different ideas.  You can dream about anything,” she said.  “In America, I can experience more…maybe all kinds of things I will never experience in China.”

For high school junior Dolly Luo, it's simply about getting the best education.  “The U.S. has the most well-developed college education," said the 16-year-old Beijing native who loves Harry Potter and dreams about attending an Ivy League college.

Her parents have similar faith in the U.S. college experience.

“She will have more opportunities, and it will broaden her horizons,” said William Luo.  In fact, Dolly’s father had harbored his own U.S. scholarly ambitions, but he didn’t have the financial resources to enable him to pursue his graduate studies in America.

“I hope when Dolly goes abroad and she learns American values or Western values that she can absorb the Western education – the good parts: the culture, the education,” continued Luo.  “In China, we would need that.” 

BEIJING — The news that North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il had died made its way to the Chinese capital mid-Monday morning.  Very soon, police tape surrounded the North Korean embassy, where its national flag was lowered to half-staff.

State-run newspapers The China Daily and The Global Times posted the news on their websites -- the latter going with a special section dedicated to the eccentric leader of China’s tiny but troublesome northeastern neighbor. 

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Featuring comments by users of Weibo  (the Chinese microblog) and a Kim family tree, the Global Times site was worthy of a Chinese state leader, reflecting the closeness of the two regimes enduring more than half a century.

The Chinese state-run television CCTV broke into regular programming, about twenty minutes before its daily noontime news broadcast, to run a special report on Kim’s death.  Its Pyongyang news team was the first to get reaction within the isolated state out to the world.  The nine-minute clip shows a variety of North Korean citizens crying, almost all unable to speak to the camera.

Despite running his country like a cult, impoverishing and starving his own people while building a nuclear arsenal, Kim was more often than not ridiculed for his appearance and his personality.  Twitter users posted memorable moments such as an Economist magazine cover with Kim with bouffant hair in tinted glasses:Greetings, Earthlings.

We, on the other hand, would like to remember the Dear Leader in action.  After all, the DPRK’s Korean Central News Agency said Kim died while travelling back from a “rural inspection tour.”  What better way to mark his passing away than with a look back at other inspection tours, thanks to this great Tumblr site.

Updated at 6:41 a.m. ET:

Like father, like son.

Within hours of news of the elder Kim’s death, the Tumblr page above spawned a junior: Kim Jong Un looking at things.

BEIJING—While China’s chief climate negotiator is getting rock star treatment at the Durban climate summit this week, his peers back in the capital are suffering a third straight day of foul air.

As a leading Canadian newspaper put it, China provided “the few glimmers of hope at the stalled negotiations” in Durban, where "photographers and television journalists swarmed around the chief Chinese negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, as he entered a news conference on Monday to announce his list of conditions for considering a legally binding treaty on carbon emissions after 2020."

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It seems that despite being the world's biggest carbon emitter, China could be the key to a deal on a legally binding agreement to reduce emissions.

However, not many glimmers of hope could be spotted back home.

A persistent 'fog'
The Chinese state-run print media all ran headline stories Tuesday morning on the persistent "fog" that has blanketed Beijing and parts of the country’s northeast since the weekend. (See video above of the "hazardous" level of smog on Monday).

Much of the coverage focused on the hundreds of flights cancelled at the Beijing Capital International airport—the world’s second busiest hub—or the rising and very vocal concerns about air pollution.  Some local reports referred to sales of air filter masks and air filter machines spiking in the past week.

Still more reports tried to cast the air pollution issue as one of sovereignty.  "The heavy fog or smog that has shrouded Beijing in the past couple of days has triggered a renewed round of debate over the different air pollution standards applied by China and the United States," said an opinion piece in the Global Times, a state-run newspaper with a strong nationalist overtone.

But at least these same newspapers are now calling it "smog" rather than "fog," as they were just a day ago.  The China Daily, another state-run newspaper, ran a headline on page 3 crying, "Exposure to smog is severe hazard."  Later in the day, the paper’s web site posted four stark images of the same location showing changes in air visibility. (See photo above). The images are pretty staggering.

Only 13 days of 'good' air this year so far

And as we write this, the ever-trusty and ever-reliable @BeijingAir Twitter feed has been down five hours, prompting followers to wonder whether the pollution has finally gotten to the air quality index monitor that lives on top of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

A sobering analysis of the @BeijingAir feed can be found in this post by China Dialogue, which notes that the improvements in air quality claimed by officials at the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau "are due to irregularities in the monitoring and reporting of air quality – and not to less polluted air."

Moreover, based on the analysis using the @BeijingAir data, this year there have only been 13 days of "good" air quality. 

Buried further amidst the quantitative data was one more alarming point: "…if Beijing’s fine particulate concentration even reached the polluted levels of Los Angeles, life expectancy may increase by over five years."

We at NBC News Beijing are trying to claw back a few months to our life span.  We have just taken delivery of two air filter machines for the bureau.

YINGJING, SICHUAN—The panda was always one of my favorite animals.

Until I found myself slipping and sliding down a steep muddy mountain slope in southwestern Sichuan, looking for panda poop.

To be precise, someone else was searching. 

My colleagues and I were just attempting to keep up with him on what was easily one of the more physically grueling NBC News assignments we’d all been on in years.

Li Guiren, a fleet-footed 36-year old Sichuan native who works at the Chinese Forestry Department, was hiking through the mud, following coordinates on his bright yellow GPS device.  He’s one of 70 “trackers” working in Sichuan to count pandas in the wild—which they do by collecting panda droppings.  (More on that in a moment.)

China kicked off its panda census last month.  It’s the fourth one since the 1970s, when they instituted the practice to keep tabs on the worldwide panda bear count every 10 years.

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The wild panda is only found in China, across parts of three provinces of Sichuan, Gansu, and Shaanxi, covering 5,400 square miles.  Or the size of Connecticut.

The bears like being high up, usually somewhere between 4,000 and 11,500 square feet above sea level in mountain forests with a damp climate.

The last census revealed only 1,596 wild pandas existed with 290 pandas in captivity around the world.

“About 70 to 80 percent [of all the pandas in the world] live in Sichuan,” said Huang Zhi of the Bifengxia Panda Breeding Center in Ya’an, Sichuan.  “Sichuan also has the highest number of wild pandas.”

Trackers in the field
Sichuan is also where the two-year panda census project has launched.  Smaller teams in Gansu and Shaanxi will begin working in the field next year.

Early in the morning, a group of twenty men suited up in wet-weather clothes and thin boots.  They reviewed their cartographic materials and compared notes one last time before setting off.  Each one carried the same bright yellow GPS device Li was toting.

Li, who took part in the last panda census, said new technology has had a huge impact on their work.  “We can get a lot more done more quickly,” he said, with the GPS device shaving the amount of time in the field down by about 30 percent.

Each tracker is assigned a near-vertical tract of land to explore.  On average, they cover 1.2 to 1.5 square miles a day, looking for panda droppings.  (A typical male panda roams in a territory about 3.3 square miles whereas a female confines herself to 1.8 square miles.)  Li found a pile that looked like it had been produced within the past three days, which he bagged and brought back to base camp for analysis.

“We take a sample for DNA testing,” he said as he prepared the panda waste.  “The DNA test demands fresh feces not more than four days old.  This is very fresh.”

But DNA testing isn’t foolproof so Li and his colleagues also measured the undigested bamboo scraps to help identify the pandas individually.  “We measure the width of the teeth marks,” he explained.  Each bear has an individual bite with differing teeth sizes.

Habitat challenges
While in the panda’s natural habitat, the research teams also take detailed notes of the conditions and its geology. 

“What people normally care about is the number of the pandas,” said Gu Xiaodong, a scientist with the Sichuan branch of the Wildlife Survey Conservation and Management in the Forestry Department.  “We care more about the quality of their habitat.”

With the data the trackers are collecting, the scientists will be able to analyze changes to the habitat and "draw up more effective conservation policies," continued Gu.  “For example, last time we found pandas in locations between the reserves we had established,” he said.  “So we had to set up more reserves to protect these pandas.”

Researchers also hope to have more detailed information about the impact of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which measured 7.9 (by the U.S. Geological Survey) and devastated the famed Wolong Giant Panda Reserve Center, one of the earliest research bases set up by the Chinese government in the early 1980s. 

But humans remain the biggest threat to the survival of wild pandas.

With more than 80 million people, Sichuan is one of China’s more densely populated provinces.  In recent years, it has seen large inflows of government investment and is rapidly urbanizing.  Scientists have cited roads and high-speed railways as a major hazard encroaching on the panda’s natural habitat in the mountains.

But mining is also a problem.  The day we trudged up the mountain with Li and Gu, we passed a couple of mines—one of them lead, whose run-off cast an unhealthy gray tinge to the river.  Loud explosions went off even during our hike, unsettling us as much as the pandas.

“The place where we are doing research now, it’s always been a traffic-intensive area with a lot of human activity,” said Gu.  “The pandas here probably choose to go higher.”

But they still sometimes descend into human territory, especially if it means getting something to eat other than bamboo plants. While the giant panda's diet consists mostly of bamboo, they do have the digestive system of carnivores. 

Gu confirmed that local farmers have regularly complained about pandas raiding their livestock.  “One farmer has his goats eaten by pandas every year,” recalled Gu, who said the Forestry Department offers compensation in such instances.

Mating challenges
Mating habits are also a challenge, particularly for pandas in captivity.

Female pandas are only in heat for three days a year.  The window for conceiving is very narrow—from 12 to 24 hours during those 72 hours.

Pandas in the wild don’t generally have a problem reproducing, said Huang from the breeding center.  But those in captivity usually need a bit of help—whether through artificial insemination or even the famed panda porn method.

Despite the success in breeding the cuddly animals in captivity, there’s been none so far in re-introducing fully domesticated pandas into the wild.

Nonetheless, researchers say they think breeding programs and conservation efforts have worked to keep the panda from advancing any closer to extinction.

“We really hope once the census is done, we’ll find more pandas than we found in the last census,” said Li.  “That will mean what we’ve been doing has made progress.”

And if the scientists are right, that will make at least one civilian very happy.

A man by the name of An Yanshi in Sichuan is collecting panda poop by the bucket-loads to make tea—with curative properties.

“Pandas have a very poor digestive system and only absorb about 30 percent of everything they eat,” An has been quoted as saying.  “That means their excrement is rich in fibres and nutrients.”

He plans to market the tea as the world’s most expensive—at $36,000 a poop.  A pop.  A pound.

BEIJING – As the deadline approaches for paying a whopping tax bill of $2.4 million, Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has collected nearly half that amount from supporters across China.

“I’m very surprised,” said the 54-year old Ai in his studio in northeastern Beijing.  “I never really [wanted] people to donate anything to us.”

Last Tuesday, the authorities presented the bill to his company, known as Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd, and issued a deadline of November 15.  Fake, which is registered in the name of Ai’s wife, manages the artist’s affairs.  The government is seeking the back taxes and fines based on tax evasion charges they made earlier this year against Ai during his 81-day detention in an undisclosed location.

Ai immediately turned to his apparent favorite medium of expression these days, the Internet, to solicit donations from followers. 

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An unorthodox way of fundraising
While the artist said he has the means to find the money himself to pay the tax bill, he wanted to bring attention to how the government is treating him.  Ai’s family and supporters have maintained that the tax evasion charges come as retaliation for his constant attacks on the Chinese central government.

Ai has said he considers the donations a “loan” and intends to pay everyone back.  

The donations have come in many shapes and sizes.  Roughly 25,000 people have sent in donations by Alipay (a Chinese version of PayPal), money orders, and cash–wrapped around fruit or folded as paper planes thrown over the garden wall into his compound.

“Society should be more tolerant,” said Zhao Yangping, a retired engineer living in Beijing.  We found her leaving the studio, where she had just donated some money on behalf of relatives from overseas who wanted to show their support for Ai.  “Why should the government be so nervous?  He deserves more freedom.  The government is too harsh on him, too sensitive.”

The government maintains otherwise.

In the state-run newspaper, The Global Times, an editorial questioned whether Ai’s unorthodox response was legal, “Since he's borrowing from the public, it at least looks like illegal fund-raising.”

It also looks like people – even if still a small fraction given the size of China's population – are taking a stand in the battle between Ai and the government.  "It is obviously…about that,” Ai said.  “It’s about how people vote with very [limited] possibilities….  We use our money to vote.  It’s our ticket.”

Collateral damage?
Despite initial reports stating that he was unsure yet about whether to pay the fine and back taxes, Ai confirmed to NBC News he would do so by next Tuesday.

“I think we have to,” he said.  “If you don’t pay, then you violate another law….  And it’s not me now, they are not aiming at me.  The tax company said it’s not you.  It’s the company.  In the company, there are several people [who are] innocent.”

Nonetheless, innocent people are affected by Ai’s activism.

On the day NBC News visited Ai, a young woman was waiting to confer with him about a predicament.

Wu Hongfei, a writer-journalist whose main passion she says is singing for her rock band, Happy Avenue, had just learned a concert for a birthday party this weekend had been cancelled.

“The authorities told Yugong Yishan [a public concert venue] that they cannot hold the performance,” she said.  Managers at the club were not given any explanation, according to Wu, but she reckoned it had to do with their decision to give out sunflower seeds to ticket buyers as “a special birthday gift” from Wu to her audience.

Harmless or odd as it might seem, the gesture could be interpreted by authorities as an overt show of support for Ai. 

“Sunflower Seeds” is the name of a major installation Ai mounted late last year at the Tate Modern, a prestigious museum in London.  It was still on display in April, when the artist was detained in Beijing, and drew even more widespread attention as a result of his arrest.

Wu has already had one other concert shut down by local officials—again no reason was given although she suspects it’s because of her association with Ai.

“This is irrational.  We’re not even that close friends.  I don’t bother the government.  I don’t even understand politics,” she said.  “If I can’t perform, then what can I do?  I really love my band.”

Read more reports in Behind the Wall on Ai Weiwei

The show goes on in New York, minus detained Chinse artist

SLIDESHOW of Ai Weiwei's work