BEIJING DAILY, cyYES.com (China)

SHANGHAI - The Americans are stirring trouble again. This time it's the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai.

Following the American Embassy in Beijing, the Shanghai consulate announced two days ago that it's going to publish the air quality index every hour using the PM 2.5 measurement that tallies micro-particles.

For the first day, the published readings were between two to three times higher than the official figure published by the Shanghai Environmental Protection Bureau, according to the report by cnYES.com.

Again, this aroused a tornado of discussion among China's netizens. "We don't want beautiful figures. What we want is the true statistic," one blogger declared.

Last December when the northern coastal area, including Beijing, was covered by thick smog for weeks, the US Embassy staff in the capital posted a hazardous high PM2.5 index 10 times the European Union's maximum ratio of 50, causing alarm amongst residents.

The storm set off earned the American ambassador the label of "troublemaker" from pro-regime commentators. The Beijing daily wrote: "Instead of committing himself to developing Sino-US relations, the American Ambassador seems to be looking for faults and deliberately making trouble in China." the Beijing Daily wrote.

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