Under the Dome and the Future of Global Cities

Jing Chai’s Internet sensation Under the Dome is universally heralded by reviewers in the U.S. and Europe. Each reviewer first notes how the online sensational feature-length “Ted”-like talk drew more than 200 million views from Chinese audiences in the few days before being taken down by Chinese government censors. According to Yan Ren of The Guardian, “For three days straight, it was the only topic on China’s social media platforms.” But as Steven Mufson of The Washington Post notes, the documentary also “alters the way we see the world around us.” As a high tech Silent Spring, according to the Wilson Center’s Jennifer Turner, Under the Dome applies a rhetoric and structure similar to that of Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) with one major difference, its exclusive focus on pollution in the cities of China (Mufson).

Like An Inconvenient Truth, Under the Dome succeeds not because of its predictions but because of the eco-memories it evokes. And like Gore’s film, Chai’s documentary draws on environmental nostalgia we share for a better, cleaner world. Although environmental nostalgia is by definition limited, since a pure, untouched, and unpolluted past projected onto a now lost wilderness cannot recover its history, as in An Inconvenient Truth, Chai’s message gains rhetorical force when the emotional appeal of environmental nostalgia is evoked within a comparison and contrast mode. But Chai’s film also makes the ecocity global and attainable by defining and illustrating practical solutions everyone can apply.