In the months since we started this project, seeing any sky at all in the capital city is a luxury. Many Beijing residents are buying air purifiers or filters for their homes or cars. So when the Chinese government lashed out against the U.S. government's unilateral air monitoring, a lot of Chinese residents got furious. "Why don't you spend time fixing the problem instead of playing a blame game?" was a common post on Weibo, China's version of Twitter.

China, to be fair, has spent a lot of time and money to try to fix the problem. Over the 10 years before the 2008 Games, for instance, Beijing invested an estimated $32 billion to clean the air. They also shut down some industries for months and removed nearly half of the city's cars from roads -- authoritarian governments can do that -- the air did look better, even athlete-friendly. For a while, anyway.

Federico Rampini, once a Beijing correspondent for Italian paper La Repubblica who also loved to run, had to stop when his doctor discovered spots on an X-ray of his lungs, he told me. "Have you been smoking lately?" the doctor asked him. "No," Rampini said, "I have never smoked and I never will."

In China, grassroots environmental NGO's are using their own equipment to monitor air pollution. The Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs maps air and water pollution that's produced by industries in most Chinese provinces, increasing public pressure on these polluters. Chinese celebrities sometimes hop on the bandwagon too. Beijing real estate tycoon Pan Shiyi, with 10 million followers on his weibo account, posts pollution data online.

Few non-political issues in China garner so much attention today. The Chinese government does seem to be listening and at least trying to act. More and more local governments, under public pressure to publish pollution data, are starting to release data on the concentration of particulates in the air, as well as on pollutants such as NO2, SO2 and Ozone. The public is also getting more engaged, as bad pollution strikes lesser-known cities. In Wuhan, a city in central China, the sky turned brown on June 11 as the air pollution index registered an astounding 478 on a scale from zero to 500.

Still, the challenges to cleaning China's air are daunting. We hope that our website will help foster ideas as well as awareness. There's a long way to go, for sure, but you don't need me to tell you: just look at the pictures.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.