Over 150 million people have seen this film..
Chai Jing, a former television journalist from China, released a self-funded documentary about the long term effects of air pollution in China last Saturday, which has since gone viral, racking up over 150 million views in it's first weekend alone.
Titled Under the Dome, the video featured Chai giving a presentation on stage about the stunning and tragic effects of pollution on people and families across China, including Jing's own family — and why the Communist Party has failed to fix it.
China's media and internet are some of the most censored in the world, and under normal circumstances, such a film would have probably been removed from the net before gaining so much traction. Yet, extraordinarily, 150 million views later, Jing's film has been allowed to remain online. Chinese government officials have even praised her work.
The documentary is just now starting to gain attention outside of China, and fortunately Upworthy have added English subtitles to some parts of the film.
China's air pollution is so bad that many children in China live most of their days stuck indoors to keep them safe from the polluted air.
As Upworthy summarised, at the 3:45 mark in the film, Jing plays a clip of an interview she did with a little girl in 2004, that drives the issue home.
READ: China suffers 670,000 smog-related deaths each year
The documentary for Jing is extremely personal, her daughter was born with a tumour, which she is convinced is linked to the unsafe levels of air pollution.
An operation to remove the tumour at birth was successful, but during the year that Jing was working on the documentary, only 190 days were safe enough for her to take her daughter outside. The other 175 days were too smoggy to go outside.
Last month, a top government official said that China had to cut emissions by as much as 50 percent in order to make any noticeable progress toward cleaner air.
READ: China's latest fashion craze: Smog masks
Jing says in the documentary, that she had watched a tv series called 'Under The Dome', about a small town in America that a dome falls over, sealing everyone and everything inside.
"One day I realised we are living in such a dome," she continues, an extremely dangerous one.
READ: Beijing plans to ban coal use by the end of 2020
A lot of people expected this documentary to be taken offline, yet it is seemingly an environmental issue that simply cannot be concealed, and one that China's government know they have to tackle urgently.
Jing doesn't think China is a hopeless case. She points out that it wasn't that long ago that places like Pittsburgh and London had similar air pollution problems, and overcame them.
And check out Upworthy's full video run down with images and time-codes here.
