Chai Jing's "Under the Dome" is inspiring. She paces superbly in her narration, which is in the TED talk style, but much longer - 104 minutes. There are no fancy visual effects, but the audience obviously resonated with the storyline and arguments Chai presented. The entire presentation flows beautifully, so even though it's very substantive and contains lots of statistics, it's engaging.
She uses a series of very clear and sensible questions to guide her investigation and walk the viewers through her narration. She most likely did not know exactly what she would find, so her investigation plan - including where to go, whom to interview, etc. - must have adjusted to the circumstances. This process is similar to what good design research requires.
Her interview skill is very impressive, too. She obviously did her homework, which made her probing questions really sharp and to the point. Her demeanor effectively mitigates the critical nature of her questions.
The video of her talk became so popular that within a few weeks more than 20 million people had watched it before the Chinese government censors banned it from public access.
Until this video was released on Feb. 28, the middle class in China generally seemed to have bought into the Chinese authority's economic development argument - the country is making progress steadily in political reform, sustainability, and other quality-of-life measures while making sure first and upmost living standards are improving. Chai's video effectively challenges this myth, even though she didn't say it explicitly in the video. After listening to Chai, it's not hard to see the Chinese middle class ask questions such as: If the air is so toxic, does it matter how much the GDP growth rate is? Why hasn't the government taken more action to protect the health of the general public? Why have the environmental protection authorities and the laws been idle instead of doing their job?
This video may have created another watershed - Many Chinese hitherto have believed corruption is an individual problem isolated case by case. Banning the video may have made people realize that it's more than systemic than they previously thought, otherwise what does the government have to fear about the video?
Image Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6X2uwlQGQM (1:00:22)
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