The short story “The Smog Society” by Chen Qiufan was published for the first time in 2010.

Lao Sun is a retired man who collaborates with what’s commonly called “The Smog Society”, an environmental non-governmental organization that among other things takes car of collecting data on the city’s smog. The analysis of the data collected leads to the conclusion that there’s a correlation between smog and the inhabitants’ happiness but the terms of that correlation are surprising.