Controversial documentary about pollution in China is now being scrubbed from the web

With the crushing inevitability of a lungful of toxins on a Beijing spring morning, China’s controversial documentary about pollution, Under the Dome, is this evening being scrubbed from the internet. It accrued over 200 million views in the country in the past five days, but now the nation’s censors appear to be cracking down.

The 104-minute film, created by former state TV news anchor Chai Jing, has just vanished from the nation’s biggest video site. It was here, but now it’s gone and leads to a “404 error” page. It’s also been removed from several other video streaming sites, such as Tencent, Tudou, Sohu, and LeTV.

This is how the Youku embed of Under the Dome now appears in websites that had embedded it:

Vanished: this is how embeds of Under the Dome now appear.

We’ve contacted Youku about this issue.

Suppressing debate

China’s censors allowed the film, which mixed interviews with government officials and ordinary people with a presentation by Chai that resembles a TED talk, to be shown around the web and for discussion about it to swirl on TV and social media for the whole week since it was released. But yesterday the tide turned when Chinese authorities circulated a censorship order to the nation’s top two social networks, WeChat and Weibo, to delete some posts about Under the Dome and prevent new ones being created if the text was critical of the government. “Resolutely block and delete speech that uses this as an opportunity to cast doubt or attack the government,” said the directive.

One day later, the documentary and its inconvenient truths are also being scrubbed away.