Beijing authorities sanguine as pollution documentary takes China by storm

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/05/beijing-sanguine-pollution-documentary-china

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It is more than a documentary; it is a sensation. In less than a week, a hard-hitting film about the air pollution afflicting China has been viewed more than 300 million times: equivalent to more than a fifth of the country’s population watching it.

Under The Dome, a slick production by a former reporter for the state broadcaster, has gripped a public accustomed to griping about the smog. But perhaps the most striking thing about Chai Jing’s film has been the sympathetic response that it has elicited from at least some in authority, despite its relative boldness on a potentially controversial subject.

The film’s extraordinary success owes much to promotion on the website of the official People’s Daily and other state-run media. The environment minister has also praised it.

The Chinese government has become open in acknowledging a problem it used to evade. Premier Li Keqiang told Thursday’s opening session of the National People’s Congress, China’s largely rubber-stamp parliament: “Environmental pollution is a blight on people’s quality of life and a trouble that weighs on their hearts ... We must fight it with all our might.”

Chai has said concerns about her daughter’s health prompted her to quit her job and invest her own time and money to make the film.

But the coverage in state media, widespread discussion on social media, Chai’s long association with CCTV and the sensitive timing of the film’s release – just before the NPC – have prompted speculation that officials have not tolerated but encouraged it. While the central propaganda department reportedly warned news outlets not to cover the 100-minute documentary as viewing figures soared, censors are muting rather than rooting out discussion.

The film is still widely available. The editor of the documentary channel at Tencent – one of many Chinese sites offering Under The Dome – said the film had been viewed 316 million times by Thursday lunchtime.

Li Yan, the climate and energy campaign manager at Greenpeace East Asia, said the hundreds of millions of hits generated by the film and the subsequent public discussion were “a huge step forward”.

“The public are now expressing their discontent and some families are taking protection measures, but it’s still a long way from being able to understand and support relevant policies.”

It is still common to see people exercising outdoors on heavily polluted days without protection, as the film shows. Chai says she too was blase about pollution before her daughter’s birth.

The documentary has drawn comparisons with An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim’s documentary about Al Gore’s climate change campaign, and Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring and nods to both. the lecture that frames it is clearly inspired by Gore’s and Carson appears in a brief clip.

Related: Viral China pollution film is brave, personal and powerful | Jennifer Duggan

Chai appears dressed casually and speaks vividly of the “war against an invisible enemy”. It is a canny, highly accessible blend of anecdote and scientific evidence with alarming graphics and memorable footage: an environmental official plunging into a hole at a polluting factory; a six-year-old who has never seen a star above her home; the blackened lungs of a non-smoking cancer patient.

Above all, Under the Dome hooks viewers with Chai’s account of learning that her unborn baby had a tumour and might not survive surgery to remove it. Though the girl is thriving, her story conveys the human cost of pollution as perhaps nothing else could.

“China has had a very severe problem for a very long time, but this really brings it to people’s attention. Chinese people have a really sensitive spot for children, so it’s a very powerful message,” said Anne-Marie Brady, an expert on China at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

It has galvanised a public already growing anxious about smog. Pew Research Center last year found that almost half of respondents – 47 per cent – to a survey judged air quality to be a “very big” problem. While more cited rising prices, corrupt officials and the rich-poor gap, the change in attitudes to environmental damage was striking: the figure had risen by 13 percentage points year on year. The “airpocalypse” of January 2013, a particularly bad period for smog, appears to have been a turning point.

Related: Top tip if you're going out in Beijing: don't breathe

“The fact the People’s Daily [website] released information on the film was really significant; that could only have had the highest approval,” suggested Brady, though she also noted that sometimes state-run news outlets took risks.

“I wondered if People’s Daily said yes and then the central propaganda department put the brakes on – are there leaders with different points of view here? My guess is that they didn’t know it would take off to quite the extent it did.”

Zhan Jiang, a journalism professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said he believed it was Chai’s independent work, adding: “The authority want the public to pay attention to pollution within limits. They want people to talk about it, but not be too keen on it.”

Though the documentary is in some ways outspoken – it offers stark examples of the failure to enforce existing laws – Chai’s remedies include calling a government hotline to report problems and choosing public transport over cars. It also points to the pollution battles that other countries have won.

Zhang Ming, politics professor at Renmin University, suggested authorities shared some common ground with the film-maker: “To solve the problem, you have to fight with some vested interest groups, which is not easy. The government wants to use public opinion to help achieve reforms.”

There has been particular interest in Chai’s stress on the role of the powerful petroleum industry, given plans to reform the sector and the scrutiny it is facing in the corruption crackdown.

Under The Dome also highlights the trade-off that China has made between economic growth and protecting the health of its people. When Chai asks an official why they cannot close factories that break environmental laws, he replies: “You must be kidding … How many people are employed by virtue of 10 million tons of steel? One hundred thousand people.”

But Li Yan, of Greenpeace, noted that the current crisis reflected problems which had accumulated over years: “In the past two years or so, the leadership are paying more and more attention to the quality rather than the speed of development,” he said.

Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, said authorities had recognised the importance of public support.

“Public participation as well as public scrutiny helps the environmental authority’s implementation of policies and regulations … [It] can be used to counter conservative elements’ efforts to blocking environmental incentives at the local level,” he said.

“The documentary has, to the highest degree, laid the foundation of public support for the new environment minister to carry out the new environmental protection law.”

Li Datong, a prominent independent journalist, said: “For an individual to produce a documentary with such impact is precious and remarkable.”

Additional research by Luna Lin