Beijing to release hourly updates on smog Beijing is to release more detailed data on pollution in the smoggy capital city, after public outcry from residents, underlining the growing influence of environmental concerns in the world's second-largest economy. Pollution has become a rallying point for public protest in China as the health costs of living in polluted surroundings have become increasingly apparent and many believe the government has obscured the true magnitude of the problem with fuzzy numbers. On Friday, Beijing's environmental bureau said that it would begin posting hourly updates this month from its pollution monitoring system, including updates for small particles known as PM 2.5 that are particularly harmful to public health. It currently measures for particles four times that size. "The public outcry had a huge impact in making this come about," said Ma Jun, an environmentalist. Before this the government was not willing to publish [the PM 2.5 data], perhaps because they were apprehensive about how it would look. According to a World Bank report, 750,000 people die in China prematurely each year, primarily from air pollution in major cities. Protests over pollution have previously forced the hand of the government, most notably in Dalian last year when officials promised to shut down a petrochemical plant after thousands took to the streets. Beijing's air pollution data struck a nerve in the city because of the obvious difference between the official pollution reports - which recorded 286 "blue sky" days last year - and the visible quality of Beijing's air, which is often hazy with a slight metallic flavour. The discrepancy is highlighted by a Twitter feed from the US embassy in Beijing, which publishes hourly readings for PM 2.5 levels from a monitoring machine on the embassy roof. The data from the US embassy routinely shows pollution levels that are more severe than the Beijing city data because of differences in what is measured. On one particularly polluted day in 2010, the embassy's reading went off the charts, prompting the Twitter feed to temporarily display a pollution measurement of "crazy bad." Chinese officials have in the past asked the embassy to stop publishing the pollution data because it makes the environmental bureau look bad, according to a cable published on WikiLeaks. Last year, Beijing's environmental authorities were caught off guard by public outrage - including in the state-run media - over the discrepancies between their data and that of the embassy. That appears to have forced Beijing's environmental authorities to move forward the planned release of the PM 2.5 data, originally due to happen before 2016, to now happen before Chinese New Year, which begins on Jan 23. Scientists say that with the inclusion of PM 2.5, Beijing's official air quality is likely to appear worse than under the previous standard, which measured larger particles known as PM 10 that had been declining in concentration in recent years. The accuracy of Beijing's air quality data has been questioned in the past. In the run-up to the Olympic Games there in 2008, statistical analysis showed Beijing's public pollution data were manipulated to make air quality improvements seem greater than they actually were.