China's Environment Minister has promised to confront an environmental challenge "unprecedented in human history" after an online film exposing his country's pollution crisis went viral with more than 100 million hits in two days.
Chen Jining, a British-educated academic who took office only last Friday, made the pledge following therelease of Under the Dome, a feature-length documentary by Chai Jing, a journalist.
Chai's film, which looks at the science and human faces behind China's smog problem, is named after a Stephen King novel in which residents of a small American town are trapped by a mysterious barrier that falls from the sky.
The documentary was released on Saturday and has been watched more than 100 million times on video sharing sites such as Youku, China's YouTube.
"China is now at the tipping point," Fu Jing, another journalist, wrote in the China Daily.
"If there is no progress in the coming five years, the consequences are likely to be irreversible, which is the stark warning Chai has given."
Professor Dali Yang, the director of the University of Chicago Centre in Beijing, compared the film to Al Gore's Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth and predicted that it would have a profound effect on Chinese society and politics.
"It is truly remarkable. It is a phenomenon," he said. "Many people have realised there is a problem but she presents it in a way that is so relevant to each individual."
Under the Dome takes viewers on a tour of China's environmental hot spots, introducing a village in the country's southwest that reputedly has the highest rate of lung cancer on earth and a city near the Russian border where buses are said to get lost because the smog is so thick.
A surgeon is filmed removing segments of a woman's blackened lung.
The presenter also travels to Los Angeles and London, delving into how those cities managed to clear their once smog-choked skies.
Some have claimed the purportedly independent production must have received a level of support from the Communist Party to avoid censorship but Yang said Chai appeared to have correctly gauged how far she could go. "She was careful in packaging it in such a way that while it is highly critical of policies and laws it was not immediately banned," he said.
Online discussion raged yesterday. "I am appalled. I can't believe things are so terrible," wrote one.
"We should ask Chai Jing to be environment minister," suggested another.
However, a directive from propaganda officials that was leaked to the China Digital Times website said: "All media must refrain from further promoting Under the Dome."
