MCLC: Under the Dome doc on air pollution (5)

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Under the Dome doc on air pollution (5)
Hello,
I think Sean Macdonald’s posting (#4) in this thread is a bit cavalier as a dismissal. If you actually see the film, you’ll notice it is quite powerful and daring, in presenting stunning facts *both* about the seriousness of the pollution (China burning more coal than the rest of the world COMBINED; comparisons with what happened in cities like London and LA, and so on and so forth, apparently the film was originally 4 hours so what you see is a distillation), *and*, the shocking lawlessness and corruption of the Chinese energy industries and government departments involved. This is a toxic combination indeed. And of course there is an internal struggle: There are many people in China now who understand the life-and-death seriousness of the issue, including inside government, and including in the self-admittedly toothless environmental departments. And including people like that Beijing vice mayor who admitted his city is now “unliveable.”
But the number one takeway from all this (including from me living in China for this academic year) is that Chinese people across the board have woken up to how this pollution is deadly serious. It will lead to your own and your children’s premature death, and that is not nice. Also, the mega-mess will take a very long time to fix and, unfortunately, many, many people will die before that happens, sacrificed on the altar of profits “development”. I used to say “China insists on the right to commit every mistake committed by Western countries” but I’ll stop saying that. It is actually different because of the censorship, which will prolong the agony.
If you put one and one together, after listening to the film’s interviews with industry and government people, you can see why the film was put down (surprise: health concerns are sidelined by blind greed in the name of information control for the sake of power). The story of the mega-viral hit and its takedown by the government is all chronicled on chinadigitaltimes.net. The film was shown on many sites, all now plastered with the cowardly message from the censors, “Site not found” — it is difficult to feel anything but contempt for the censors, whose action makes themselves look emblematically corrupt, but, no surprise, of course.
The Economist and other sources listed the number of hits as 200 million — so of course censorship works: to a high degree. Only a trickle of people can leap the firewalls which are constantly plugged up, — that is the whole point of investing such huge resources of money and manpower in censorship: it does to a large extent block out what the powers-that-be wants to block the majority of the people from seeing, so that there won’t have 400 million hits by next week, but only a few million, on foreign sites that are very difficult to get to, like Youtube or whatever (Under the Dome – Investigating China’s Smog 柴静雾霾调查：穹顶之下 (full translation)<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6X2uwlQGQM>). And that will certainly delay and delay and delay anything being done about the real issues (regulation and oversight, filtering and cleanup).
Magnus Fiskesjo <magnus.fiskesjo at cornell.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on March 10, 2015
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