Our friends at Foreign Policy hit the nail on the head by headlining writer Yiqin Fu’s Monday story “China’s National Conversation about Pollution Has Finally Begun.” What happened? Well, over the weekend, the feature-length Chinese documentary “Under the Dome” was released, first on the website of the state-run People’s Daily newspaper, then on Youku, Tudou, and Tencent. (Watch a subtitled version on YouTube above and here). The film, which narrator and veteran China Central Television journalist Chai Jing said was inspired by her fear that pollution might have been responsible for her daughter’s operation for a tumor at birth, has, at the time of this publication, been viewed more than 100 million times. Our colleagues at the Chinese-language website China-U.S. Dialogue are running their liveliest conversation yet, drawing tens of thousands of comments about Chai’s film via WeChat. In a country where media is tightly controlled, it is surprising, if not unprecedented, to see the unimpeded release of a self-funded investigative documentary about one of the most sensitive topics challenging China’s growth, especially when the film is critical of more than a few government agencies and is circulating so widely just ahead of the annual convening of China’s main legislative body. Following below are contributor reactions to what has been described at China’s “Inconvenient Truth.” —The Editors

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