While I can say from personal experience, air quality has greatly improved over the past 10 years, there are still some bad days.
Luckily, there’s an app for that!
The Air Quality app from Google Play store shows international standards air quality from many cities around China and multiple sampling centers within each city.
Average per days AQI for Shanghai over the past 30 days
As you can see in this report over the last 30 days, its been pretty good some days, and kinda bad others.
AQI for today over the past 24 hours
The past four days, its dropped well into the Good to Moderate range, due mostly to Typhoon Soulik coming in off the coast. Thankfully for us, this was the only effects we saw from this Typhoon that ravaged Taiwan and cause major flooding and killed hundreds of people in southern China.
Unfortunately, this is just the start of Typhoon season in east Asia.