Documentary on air pollution grips China

Buckley, Chris. Documentary on air pollution grips China. Sinosphere. Dispatches from China, March 1, 2015. URL : http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/documentary-on-air-pollution-in-china-grips-a-nation/?_r=0 (consulté le 2 mars 2015)

Millions of Chinese, riveted and outraged, watched a 104-minute documentary video over the weekend that begins with a slight woman in jeans and a white blouse walking on to a stage dimly lit in blue. As an audience looks on somberly, the woman, Chai Jing, displays a graph of brown-red peaks with occasional troughs.

“This was the PM 2.5 curve for Beijing in January 2013, when there were 25 days of smog in that one month,” explains Ms. Chai, a former Chinese television reporter, referring to a widely used gauge of air pollution. Back then, she says, she paid little attention to the smog engulfing much of China and affecting 600 million people, even as her work took her to places where the air was acrid with fumes and dust.

“But,” Ms. Chai says with a pause, “when I returned to Beijing, I learned that I was pregnant.”

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Voir aussi

• Haski, Pierre. « Sous le dôme », le documentaire sur la pollution qui captive le Web chinois. Rue89, 1er mars 2015. URL : http://rue89.nouvelobs.com/2015/03/01/chinas-haze-documentaire-pollution-captive-web-chinois-257989 (consulté le 3 mars 2015)
• Cunningham, Maura Elizabeth. Inconvenient truths. LARB [Los Angeles Review of Books], 11 March 2015. URL: http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/chinablog/inconvenient-truths/#more-1050 (consulté le 11 mars 2015)

Monique Abud

Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine, EHESS, Paris, France

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