Under the Dome is a 2015 self-financed Chinese documentary by Chai Jing, a former China Central Television journalist, concerning air pollution in China. It was viewed over 150 million times on Tencent within three days of its release, and had been viewed a further 150 million times by the time it was taken offline four days later.
Chai’s Under the Dome integrates various interviews and statistics with a keynote speech Chai delivered to a live audience this January in a film studio in Beijing. The 39-year-old journalist, who hails from the large, coal-mining province of Shanxi and has lived in smog-smothered Beijing for over a decade, started her January talk by calling the fight against China’s increasingly nasty air pollution “a personal grudge.” In 2004, she said, she went to Shanxi as state media China Central Television (CCTV)’s investigative journalist. In a particularly powerful sequence, Chai asked a 6-year-old girl whether she has ever seen stars or clouds in the sky. The girl said she had not.
