‘Congratulations! Another marvelous job you have done, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen. I know I can count on you.’

It was vague, and Chen knew better than to push for clarification, but he could sense a touch of sincerity, he thought, on the part of the senior Party leader.

It did not mean that Zhao agreed with the points made in his report, particularly those about the air pollution and the documentary. It would be too much of a responsibility for anyone to be specific, but it was a responsibility Inspector Chen was more than willing to take.

Two days later, the documentary ‘Hold Your Breath, China’ was released online, ahead of its original schedule.

With its simultaneous appearance on the major websites all over the country, it was said to have been viewed about thirty million times in China within the first two days of its release.

The discussions about China’s air pollution as explored and researched in the documentary immediately overwhelmed other news, including the ‘yellowish mask serial murder case’ in Shanghai, much to the relief of Party Secretary Li and his people.

For some unknown reason, the Beijing government did not hasten, for once, to make a visible effort to block the documentary, in spite of the frenzied discussion among the netizens.

Even more unbelievably, there came some positive mentions of the documentary in the official media. The Guangming Daily carried a short review commemorating the movie, and quoting a comment by the head of the Public Health Ministry that the documentary did something the people in the ministry had been unable to do for years. It concluded, not too surprisingly, that the CCP stands firmly by the side of the Chinese people in the arduous battle against the environmental crisis.

The review soon found its way into the cyber world, echoing and rippling. A considerable number of netizens took it as a possible sign for some significant change in China’s environmental policy.

Three days after the release of the documentary, Beijing witnessed the grand opening of the Thirteenth Session of China’s National People’s Congress.

During the opening session, one of its agendas was the removal of Kang from his position as a corrupt official responsible for the environmental disaster. In an editorial of the People’s Daily, Kang’s GDP-oriented argument in the interview with Yuan Jing was quoted and repudiated.

The disgraceful fall of Kang was seen as a signal pointing to Yong, the once powerful patron for the gang at the top of the Party system. Yong’s absence at the conference was commonly interpreted in connection to it.

However, the heated discussion over the documentary still went on, almost to the extent of drowning out all the political propaganda about the conference in Beijing.

On the third day of the conference, the Party authorities ordered that the documentary be removed from all the websites, and all the comments posted about it deleted or blocked as well.

For once, the official media kept mum about the governmental decision, without so much as trying to hail the abrupt turn as the correct decision by the Party government, or to interpret the meaning of it, as if nothing had happened at all.