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BEIJING — Here’s a joke circulating among 10-year-olds at my son’s state elementary school in Beijing:

A Chinese man recently arrived in America visits the doctor.

“Doctor, I feel unwell.”

“Where have you come from?”

“Beijing.”

“Breathe this,” the doctor says, holding out a pipe attached to a car exhaust.

“Thanks, I feel much better!” the man says.

Gallows humor is circulating in Beijing these days as a yellowish-gray miasma once again drapes the city and air pollution indices hit hazardous highs or largely unknown, “Beyond Index” territory, for the fourth time this month.

Shockingly, Beijing isn’t even the worst place to be: a quick check of the China Air Pollution Index app showed that at the time of writing it was merely the 21st most polluted city in the country today. No. 1, as nearly always, was the unfortunate town of Shijiazhuang, an industrial base about 280 kilometers southwest of Beijing in Hebei province.

The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reports that almost one-seventh of China was shrouded in smog this week.

Hundreds of flights, including some international ones, were canceled or delayed and highways shut due to the “haze,” the state-run China Daily reported, adding that Beijing’s pollution was the highest possible level, “severe.”

And, indicating a source of the problem, a report on Tuesday from the U.S. Energy Information Administration said that China consumed 3.8 billion tons of coal in 2011, or 47% of global consumption, “almost as much as the entire rest of the world combined.” Coal consumption grew more than 9 percent in 2011, the report said. Coal is, of course, a key source of the particulate pollution plaguing the country today and of global warming via greenhouse gases.

How did things get this bad?

In a rare interview published last week, Qu Geping, China’s first environmental protection chief, placed the blame squarely on the country’s “economic growth at all costs” mentality and on the political system.

Developing countries commonly suffer from worse pollution than developed ones, yet Mr. Qu told the South China Morning Post that pollution had run wild over the last 40 years as a result of unchecked economic growth under “rule of men,” a term often used here to refer to decision-making that flouts the law.

“Their rule imposed no checks on power and allowed governments to ignore environmental protection laws and regulations,” the Post wrote in the article.

The article quoted Mr. Qu, 83, China’s first environmental protection administrator between 1987 and 1993, as saying, “I would not call the past 40 years’ efforts of environmental protection a total failure.”

“But I have to admit that governments have done far from enough to rein in the wild pursuit of economic growth,” he said, “and failed to avoid some of the worst pollution scenarios we, as policymakers, had predicted.”

After 1993, Mr. Qu headed the environment and resource committee of China’s Parliament, the National People’s Congress, for 10 years, the Post said.

China early recognized it faced a pollution problem amid high-speed growth and had some forward-looking strategies that emphasized a more balanced approach to development, Mr. Qu said.

“Why was the strategy never properly implemented?” he said. “I think it is because there was no supervision of governments. It is because the power is still above the law.”

“There was an obvious contradiction in the central government’s claim to co-ordinate growth with conservation and its unchecked thirst for economic development rooted in a political system,” the newspaper wrote, in a comment attributed to Mr. Qu.

Since the early 1980s, when economic growth took off, China witnessed at least three waves of pollution, the Post wrote.

The first was caused by the boom in so-called township enterprises – businesses run by farmers in the countryside – that started 1984 and led to the “chaotic spreading of pollution.”

The second was the rush to develop infrastructure and industrial projects after 1992 that resulted in pollution of major rivers and lakes and the degradation of urban air quality.

The third occurred over the last decade under President Hu Jintao, which saw a renewed wave of building of energy-intensive and highly polluting heavy industries, including petrochemical, cement, iron and steel plants, that turned China into the world’s biggest polluter.

“In the face of such mounting pressures, all the administrative orders and technical solutions on pollution control became inadequate,” Mr. Qu said.

Leaving China where it is today, with large areas engulfed in smog.