[After the video’s
release, other officials, including some at state-owned enterprises that often
bridle at stricter environmental regulations, came out strongly against the
film. The battle lines reflected those in the broader conflict over the
environment in China.]
By Edward Wong
 |
|
Residential buildings in
Wuhan in Hubei Province were shrouded in
heavy smog last month.
China's environmental degradation is among
the worst in the world.
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BEIJING — “Under
the Dome,” a searing documentary about China’s
catastrophic air pollution, had hundreds of millions of views on Chinese
websites within days of its release one week ago.
The country’s new
environment minister compared it to “Silent Spring,” the landmark 1962 book
that energized the environmental movement in the United States. Domestic and
foreign journalists clamored to interview the filmmaker, a famous former
television reporter, though she remained silent.
Then on Friday afternoon,
the momentum over the
video came to an abrupt halt, as major Chinese video websites
deleted it under orders from the Communist Party’s central propaganda
department.
The startling phenomenon
of the video, the national debate it set off and the official attempts to quash
it reflect the deep political sensitivities in the struggle within the Chinese
bureaucracy to reverse China’s environmental degradation,
among the worst in the world. The drama over the video has ignited speculation
over which political groups were its supporters and which sought to kill it,
and whether party leaders will tolerate the civic conversation and grass-roots
activism that in other countries have been necessary to curbing rampant
pollution.
“It’s been spirited away
by gremlins,” said Zhan Jiang, a professor of journalism and media studies in
Beijing.
The video was made by
Chai Jing, a former investigative reporter for China Central Television, with help from other
former employees of the state network. It appears obvious that Ms. Chai had the
cooperation of pro-environment officials in the party and government, according
to interviews with state media employees and material in the documentary and on
supporting websites.
After the video’s
release, other officials, including some at state-owned enterprises that often
bridle at stricter environmental regulations, came out strongly against the
film. The battle lines reflected those in the broader conflict over the
environment in China.
The 104-minute
documentary, whose title is a reference to the grim smog that pervades daily
life in many Chinese cities, had become the hottest topic of conversation among
many Chinese. But by Friday evening, people in China who wanted to view it on
the websites of major Internet companies like Youku and Tencent found only dead
links. The website of People’s Daily, the official party newspaper, had
initially promoted the video and posted an interview with Ms. Chai, but those
had been deleted by Friday morning.
The censors’ guillotine
fell a day after the start of the annual session of the National People’s
Congress, the party-controlled legislature that is supposed to represent official
candor and accountability.
In recent years, there
has been fast-growing anxiety among
middle-class Chinese over fatal, widespread pollution of
the air, water and soil resulting from a lack of environmental regulations
governing industries.
Ms. Chai’s self-financed
documentary touched nerves in part because she voiced those concerns in a
straightforward manner, from the perspective of an average citizen. The video
had the polished format of a PowerPoint presentation or TED Talk, with Ms. Chai
presenting sobering scientific facts to an audience from a stage while dressed
simply in a white blouse and jeans. Ms. Chai, 39, hooked viewers, too, by
talking candidly about her fears of the threats posed by air pollution to her
infant daughter’s health — a common concern among
Chinese parents.
Ms. Chai tackled the
politics of environmental regulation in the video by showing how little power
officials at the Ministry of Environmental Protection have to enforce
antipollution laws. As portrayed in the film,their adversaries are
large state-owned enterprises and some private companies, among them oil and
gas businesses, steel producers and automakers.
The film includes
interviews with officials from the Ministry of Environmental Protection talking
about their inability to regulate those companies. Last Sunday, the new
environment minister, Chen Jining, compared the video to Rachel Carson’s
“Silent Spring” in an inaugural news conference with Chinese reporters in
Beijing.
“I think this work has an
important role in promoting public awareness of environmental health issues, so
I’m particularly pleased about this event,” Mr. Chen said, according to Chinese
news reports.
Though Ms. Chai had help
from that ministry’s officials in the making of her film and appeared to
empathize with their plight, she knew there were political red lines, friends
and advisers of hers have said. In the final cut, she avoided broad criticisms
of China’s political system.
An investigative
journalist and friend of Ms. Chai, Yuan Ling, said by telephone that a longer
early version of the film had a section in which Ms. Chai argued that the air
pollution was a result of China’s development model, and that China would have
to change this.
“If the film had been
this way, it would have been long, heavy and depressing,” Mr. Yuan said. Ms.
Chai cut that material.
In the interview on the
People’s Daily website, now deleted, Ms. Chai said she sent some of her
interview material to official groups, including the legal committee of the
National People’s Congress and a government team working on changing the oil
and gas industries. She received feedback from both groups, she said.
Despite such official
support, attempts to stifle or criticize the video grew after its release, as
officials grappled with its surging popularity.
Early this week,
propaganda officials issued a directive telling Chinese news organizations not
to report on the film and ordered video websites not to play it on their home
pages, though those sites could keep it online. Editors at Global Times, a
populist newspaper under the management of People’s Daily, had to kill articles
and opinion pieces that separately criticized and supported Ms. Chai’s
documentary, newspaper employees said.
Some officials of
state-owned enterprises vented their fury. One senior oil company official, Wan
Zhanxiang, wrote an essay for Cubeoil.com that attacked Ms. Chai’s
arguments. “Maybe she doesn’t have enough brains and not enough knowledge or
thoughts,” he wrote. “Anyway, she has no insights.”
Some critics said online
that Ms. Chai had received foreign financing for her documentary, even though
she had said in the People’s Daily interview that she had spent about $160,000
of her own money to make the film. The money came from earnings from her books,
she said.
The uproar over the
documentary occurred at a politically sensitive time — during the opening week
of this year’s meeting of the National People’s Congress, when party and
government officials gather in Beijing to discuss broad policy matters. There
has been speculation online that Ms. Chai’s documentary and the timing of its
release were part of an effort by the Ministry of Environmental Protection to
push party leaders this week to support greater regulatory powers against
state-owned enterprises and other companies.
Mr. Yuan, Ms. Chai’s
friend, called that a “conspiracy theory” and said such a move would have been
“too risky for the ministry.”
After a week of
passionate public discourse over the film, the central propaganda department
told websites on Friday to remove “Under the Dome.” Mr. Zhan, the journalism
and media studies professor, said officials had waited through the week “to see
what would happen, in sort of an opportunistic strategy.”
Those in China who wanted
to view the film on Friday afternoon had to search for it in obscure corners of
the Chinese Internet or go to sites like YouTube, which is blocked here but is
accessible with work-around software.
On Friday evening,
Xinhua, the state news agency, posted on Twitter, which is also blocked here,
that “President Xi Jinping vows to punish, with an iron hand, any violators who
destroy ecology or environment, with no exceptions.” That night, the United
States Embassy air monitor in Beijing rated the air “hazardous.”
Kiki Zhao, Mia Li, Adam
Wu and Shanshan Wang contributed research.
