"What city? Surely not Beijing. Maybe Shenzhen?"

As you've caught on, I'm a bit fuzzy on the dates.. But I feel I was riding Caocao taxis in Chengdu around then?

"Definitely not the blue trucks that are only allowed inside the 5th ring at night and cause air quality to tank after midnight"

Yeah you're right! I was off the mark there. There are smog monsters at night thats for sure. Forgot about those haha. During the day the smaller refrigerated trucks were electric though

As to your last point.. It's not a simple topic, but protectionism in theory only hurts your own market and your own consumers. Reciprocity is kinda irrelevant

HN's community is large and therefore divided on divisive topics. That's more than enough to explain why there's diversity of opinion on, for example, geopolitical topics. Everyone needs to abide by the rules in the presence of such topics so that this place does not end up burning itself to a crisp. Therefore, please don't post to HN like you did here—instead, please make your substantive points respectfully and thoughtfully.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

That link points out that air pollution isn’t “primarily” due to vehicle emissions except in some cities.

  On both regional and national scales, vehicle emission has been identified as one of the most important contributors to air pollution in most cities in China (Gong et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2010; Wu et al., 2016), and has even surpassed other contamination sources in some cities.

"Lots of air pollution" and "lots of electric vehicles" can be true in the same sentence.

Vehicles are not the only source of severe air pollution.