Over the weekend in China, 175 million people — more than the entire population of Bangladesh — watched a newly released in-depth and well-produced documentary about the country’s debilitating smog problem. Produced by former Chinese news anchor and environmental reporter, Chai Jing, the 104-minute “Under the Dome” has caught the Chinese public at a moment of intense focus on the wide-ranging impacts of air pollution from coal-fired power plants and vehicle emissions.
In a country known for spiking any media that paints the government in a bad light, the documentary has not been firewalled. China’s new environment minister, Chen Jining, even praised it on Sunday, saying it reflected “growing public concern over environmental protection and threats to human health.” He also compared it to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which is often credited with inciting the environmental movement in the U.S., especially when it comes to the use of pesticides.
While some are also comparing the lecture-style film, which is replete with charts and visual aids, to Al Gore’s 2006 “An Inconvenient Truth,” Chai’s original motivation for making the self-sponsored film was deeply personal. She used to pay little attention to the smog engulfing her home city of Beijing, but that was before she found out she was pregnant in 2013. Shortly thereafter, she discovered in a sonogram that her child had a benign tumor.
“I’d never felt afraid of pollution before, and never wore a mask no matter where,” Chai, 39, says in the video. “But when you carry a life in you, what she breathes, eats and drinks are all your responsibility, and then you feel the fear.”
Chai told the People’s Daily that she reconciled herself to the fact that her daughter, who survived after surgery, would be a major part of the video. “If I had not had this kind of emotional impetus, I would have found it very difficult to spend such a long time completing this,” she said.
