Documentary on Air Pollution Grips China

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

 MARCH 1, 2015 5:13 AM March 1, 2015 5:13 am

Chai Jing said she was prompted to make her documentary, “Under the Dome,” by concern over the threats pollution posed to her daughter’s health.

Over the weekend, many millions of Chinese watched, gripped and outraged, a 104-minute video that begins with a slight woman in jeans and a white blouse walking onto a stage dimly lit in blue. The woman, Chai Jing, shows the somber-looking audience a graph of brown-red peaks with occasional troughs.

“This was the PM 2.5 curve for Beijing in January 2013, when there were 25 days of smog in that one month,” explains Ms. Chai, a former Chinese television reporter, referring to a widely used gauge of air pollution.

At that time, she continues, she did not pay much attention to the smog engulfing much of China and affecting 600 million people, even as she traveled for work from place to place where the air was acrid with fumes and dust.

“But,” Ms. Chai says with a pause, “when I returned to Beijing, I learned that I was pregnant.”

Since its online debut on Saturday, Ms. Chai’s documentary, “Under the Dome,” has inspired an unusually passionate eruption of public and mass media discussion. In it she recounts her journey of discovery, hunting for the sources of China’s bad air and inquiring why repeated government promises have done so little to clear it up, while coping with a daughter born with a tumor. Many messages were from Chinese parents identifying with Ms. Chai’s fears that pollution has imperiled their children’s health.

“When I heard her heart beating, the only thing I wished for her was good health,” Ms. Chai explains of her then-unborn daughter in the documentary.

“But she was diagnosed with a benign tumor and had to have surgery after birth,” she adds. “I’d never felt afraid of pollution before, and never wore a mask no matter where. But when you carry a life in you, what she breathes, eats and drinks are all your responsibility, and then you feel the fear.”

On Youku, a popular Chinese video-sharing site, “Under the Dome” had been played more than 14 million times by Sunday afternoon. The Paper, a Chinese news website, estimated that by Saturday night, the documentary had been opened more than 35 million times across various websites.

Many Chinese viewers praised Ms. Chai for forthrightly condemning the skein of industrial interests, energy conglomerates and bureaucratic hurdles that she says have obstructed stronger action against pollution. Despite online censorship, others took aim at China’s state media, lamenting that Ms. Chai was able to make her outcry against pollution only after leaving her job with the state-run China Central Television.

“Support Chai Jing or those like her who stand up like this to speak the truth,” said one of the comments — which exceeded 25,000 by Sunday afternoon — on Youku. “In this messed-up country that’s devoid of law, cold-hearted, numb and arrogant, they’re like an eye-grabbing sign that shocks the soul.”

The documentary is part science lecture, part investigative exposé and part memoir, and Ms. Chai’s own story has become a focus of praise and criticism. Ms. Chai and her husband were wealthy and privileged enough for her to have given birth in the United States, according to a flurry of news reports last year, and some comments accused her of hypocrisy. Newspapers have quoted scientists who have challenged Ms. Chai’s suggestion that her daughter’s tumor was caused by smog.

But online, most of the reaction welcomed her initiative in making the documentary with her own funding and putting it online. Indeed, some have wondered how Ms. Chai got away with it. “Under the Dome” is critical of the government’s inability to make big inroads in cutting pollution. And under President Xi Jinping, restrictions on the news media and Internet in China have become tighter than ever. In years past, Ms. Chai notes, the government insisted in public that the pollution was just natural fog.

So far at least, the government has not shut off the documentary, and some officials may welcome the chance to build greater support for cutting pollution. The website of People’s Daily, the ruling Communist Party’s main newspaper, was one of the first to post “Under the Dome.” And the recently appointed minister of environmental protection, Chen Jining, praised the video. He toldSina.com, a Chinese website, that he had watched it and sent amessage to Ms. Chai.

“Chai Jing’s documentary calls for public environmental consciousness from the standpoint of public health,” Mr. Chen said. “It deserves admiration.”

Ms. Chai, 39, was born in Shanxi Province, a part of China abundant in coal, and bathed in noxious pollution. She told the website of People’s Daily that she decided to set aside worries about making her daughter the subject of a video.

“If I had not had this kind of emotional impetus,” she told the website, “I would have found it very difficult to spend such a long time completing this.”