Under the Dome

According to Wikipedia, “Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, often involving crime, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing. An investigative journalist may spend months or years researching and preparing a report.”①(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigative_journalism)

To some extent, Chai Jing made a successful investigative film since she spent a year researching and preparing to revealing an air pollution — smog and drew enough attention.

In the over-100-minute film, Under the Dome, Chai used her way to show us “what the smog is, where they are from and what we can do.” As an experienced former CCTV reporter, she only focused on investigation and criticism but avoided appealing the public to withstand.

The film gave birth to a miracle, which was played more than 200 million times. The whole world was amazed by its remarkableness, both surprised at its wide-spread and curious about how can such a film criticizing China government be published in mainland. The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the South China Morning and some other newspapers all reported about it.

I appreciate Chai’s logical presentation and her attractive way of story-telling. She made a overwhelming special example of telling a story. During her long speech, she used personal stories, specific data, small videos, specialist and authority’s interpretations, historical analysis and comparisons among countries, which polished the speech and added sufficient information.

I can accept her personal reason of protecting her daughter and the passion to change something and that all the cost was paid by herself. I will overlook the conspiracy theories about her. That is mainly because she has already finished something significantly relative to everyone’s today and future. From my perspective, that is also one of the reasons why millions of people are willing to spend nearly two-hour in watching a long and serious speech — because we are concerned.

The film was exquisite and scientific as public-interest film calling up environmental protection. And the focus should be that the smog is serious and we are all involved, thus we should take actions to protect the environment right now. But the fact is that a lot of people just pay attention to Chai herself, who used to be a hot topic lady. You can never wake up a boy who is pretended to sleep.

After reading some relevant article, I admit that, although most of the data are accurate, inevitably, Chai made some small mistakes on some specific data, nevertheless, that will not affect the final result and conclusion. After all it is not a final report but just a film aiming at environmental protection.

I think it is ridicules that everybody is talking about whether there are some patrons behind Chai, whether this film is target at some monopolized industry or whether the data here is right. But I have never read or heard and discussion about the last 15 minus of the film, that something we can really do to help with the environment. I will not against the film even if it is true that somehow target in some industries because, unfortunately, the information I received are also basically true. The topic should be the film and the ecological concept it conveys to us rather than endless suspicion which totally covered the spirit we ought to see. We all know the following story, the Chinese government prohibited further discussion on the film and later the display of the film in mainland. What’s worse, I think , throughout the following two conferences, the topics relevant to environmental protection are still fairly limited and plain.