Vegetarian food in Beijing?

How's life in Beijing? No earthquake?? Food safe?

• I am currently living in Tokyo Japan and totally tired of this situation. We had more than 200 aftershocks since the biggest earthquake and I feel seasick all the time. I am thinking of escaping from Japan and living somewhere with Chinese culture background like Singapore, Hongkong, Taiwan, Shanghai or Beijing. But Taiwan has earthquakes too, Singapore is located close to the Sumatra island where had the hugest earthquake. In Hongkong and Shanghai air is too polluted. I wonder if it's no difference to live in contaninated Tokyo air. Beijing is also polluted but maybe slightly better than the other two cities? Do they have any earthquake in history there? Can you get safe food there? Vege covered with aguricaltural chemicals and Vege with Iodine or whatever radioactive materials Japanese goverment hides from us, which is safe for human beings to take as a daily food?

• Answer:

  Beijing is located roughly 140 kilometers northwest of Tangshan, the epicenter of a 1976 earthquake that is classified as one of the world's deadliest quakes. The official death toll is 244,000 people, but it is estimated that over 600,000 died. (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/events/1976_07_27.php ) The air in Beijing is quite bad. While it was cleaned up quite a bit for the 2008 Olympic Games, it has returned to previous levels on a massive scale. This is from a Feb 21, 2011 report: "The independent assessment by the embassy said pollution was either hazardous or "beyond index," meaning that air quality had plunged below the worst level on the scale. The Beijing Environmental Bureau said air quality in most of the city was at level five -- the worst rating. "Obviously elderly people and children should not go outside," an official at the bureau who refused to identify herself told AFP. "Particulate pollution, rising temperatures and a lack of wind caused the stifling smog, which reduced visibility in parts of the city to just 200 metres (yards), the Beijing weather bureau said in a report. "Air pollution in Beijing has been consistently listed as among the worst in the world by international organisations such as the United Nations." http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-beijing-air-pollution.html I don't know much about the air in Shanghai (I've lived in Beijing, but not in Shanghai), but I've read that it's as bad as Beijing. To be frank, while Hong Kong is an expensive city, it most likely has the least amount of pollution among the Chinese cities you've mentioned. It does have floating particle air coming from the mainland (due to all the factories in Guangdong), but I always marvel at how clean the air is there whenever I visit. No city is going to be completely safe. Natural disasters are just that . . . natural disasters. You can't predict when you are going to have dust storms, earthquakes, typhoons, etc. (Well, for some of them, you can predict within a couple of days or so, but no long-term predictions as to whether or not "this is the year" something will happen.)