“Under the Dome” is a documentary produced by Chai Jing, an ex-anchorwoman at CCTV. This documentary covers topics such as the seriousness of air pollution in China now, the scientific nature and cause of air pollution, the international practice of reducing air pollution, why government agencies cannot stop air pollution, and what citizens can do for air pollution. The whole video (with English subtitles) can be found in Youtube. Chai Jing funded the filming herself.
This film is freely accessed online, soon reached 200 million viewers[1]. Discussions in social media are heated, and many political figures (such as government officers and congress members) jumped into the discussions. There are several reasons why this film is influential: it is made of high quality, with a Steve-Jobs style keynote setting and animations for scientific concepts; it has some sorts of support for the Department of Environment (DoE), with which it can have interviews with governmental officers; it has a personal storytelling style, which could effectively spur emotion and empathy; and it has clear call-to-action message (such as which phone number should they call, which app should they install on their phone, and what people can do if they see a restaurant without a air filter), telling people what should they do to stop pollution instead of just raising awareness. And finally, this film is censored (just before the Meeting of the People’s Congress) as a result, which adds to its mystery and interestingness.
This is an interesting example of citizenship, because it is a monitorial action by a group of citizens (filmmakers), and its final purpose is to turn a larger group of people into monitorial citizens. In fact, after the film is released, the servers of the air quality monitoring app is so overloaded that they sought help from IT experts in the technical community. The telephone number of the Department of Environment is also well known through this process (although I have no data how many people actually called). But there is more to be said about this film. It concerns about environment – a basic right of citizens, and the film cannot be made without help from scientists, communication professionals, policy experts (it involves a study of how pollution is regulated in other countries), and government officers. The filming crew act more or less like a professional NGO in finding experts and lobbying / cooperating with government to put forward policy issues (which may be one reason why it is censored). Speak of the complexity of environmental issues, this film also did some science publicity work that try to inform the citizens about the cause of this issue, and raise some deliberative debate (although many members in science communities are critical about its presentation of data and research results). Instead of challenging the government as a whole, the filmmakers tries to play with the power dynamic: it speaks against the state-owned fossil energy companies; it criticizes local governments for pursuing GDP despite of environmental costs; it calls for more power to the Department of Environment; and it is first released in the people.com.cn, an official media. This deep engagement goes beyond simple binary citizen-government relationships, such as ruling or being ruled, support or oppose etc.
The film has been on (and off) for days[2]. it certainly raised some awareness – it is said that one of three Chinese citizens having access to Internet have seen this; environment protection became a top topic in the Meeting of People’s Congress; the local DoE officer is investigated by the Commission of Discipline Inspection of the local government; the new minister of DoE of the central government personally thanked Chai Jing, although any part of the government refused to comment on this film later; the film itself is censored, resulting a “no search result could be shown due to laws and regulations” in various search engines despite some discussions and news articles are still there. By who, in what way, and why this film piece is censored is still unknown.
1 – source
2 – more information and sources could be seen in this Wikipedia page (in Chinese)