Film highlighting pollution woes vanishes from China’s Internet

A 104-minute film lecture that outlines the serious pollution in China was removed from the nation’s Internet on Friday, after receiving millions of views and raising hopes that the country’s leadership might tackle China’s widespread smog problem.

The film – by Chai Jing, one of the best-known journalists in China and a well-known former state television reporter – was released right before China’s two most important political events, the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

Before the movie was censored, a story from Xinhua News Agency, China’s official press agency, praising the film was deleted online the same night the article was posted, offering a hint of the government’s real attitude.

“They killed Chai’s film, but didn’t kill the smog,” Lu Weimin, a lawyer in Shanghai, said on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular micro-blog site. “This is like getting rid of people who raise questions, but not solving problems.”

Released last Saturday, “Under the Dome” had received 42.9 million views on Youku, a video-sharing website like YouTube, by 5 p.m. Thursday. It prompted 530,460 posts on Weibo.

In the film, Chai gives a speech and shows data and interviews with government officials and environmental experts from China and abroad. The film shows striking images of the extent of air pollution in a number of Chinese cities, as well as rivers fouled by chemicals and littered with flotsam and dead fish. Chai also traveled to Los Angeles and London to gauge their experiences dealing with smog.

“In the entire year of 2014, 175 days were polluted in Beijing,” Chai says in the film, citing data from the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau. Other major cities – including Tianjin, Shenyang and Chengdu – also each had more than 100 heavily polluted days in 2014, according to the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Shijiazhuang, the capital city of Hebei province and only 200 miles from Beijing, had 264 days of pollution last year.

The reality can be even worse than the film shows, because China has a lower standard for air quality than most of the rest of the world. For example, China calls a day “good quality” when PM2.5 – tiny particles in the air that reduce visibility and affect people’s hearts and lungs – is lower than 35 micrograms per cubic meter, and “polluted” when the fine particulates reach 75, according to the Shanghai Environmental Protection Bureau. But the maximum healthy exposure to PM2.5 is 25 micrograms per cubic meter, according to 2005 guidelines from the World Health Organization. Readings in Beijing have soared higher than 300 micrograms.

Despite the standards, there’s no real punishment in China when people break the environmental law, which some point to as a key reason for the rapidly spreading pollution problems, the film notes.

“It’s an open secret in the industry that almost 90 percent of diesel vehicles don’t reach the environmental emission standard they claim they have,” said Li Kunsheng, a director in the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau. China doesn’t have a clear regulation for which governmental department is in charge of such issues, so not a single vehicle has been recalled for faulty emission equipment.

This story was originally published March 6, 2015 at 8:43 PM with the headline "Film highlighting pollution woes vanishes from China’s Internet."