It has been compared to Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s seminal work that shaped US environmental policy. Chai Jing, a former Chinese state television reporter, has produced a widely seen video documentary weaving her personal concerns for her daughter with a damning indictment of China’s toothless environmental policy.

Since its release online on Saturday, Under the Dome has notched up some 100m views on major Chinese video portals such as Tencent and Youku. It has also prompted 280 million posts on Sina Weibo, a microblogging site.

Writing in Global Voices, Owen Guo said that in the documentary a softly spoken Chai addressed a live audience in a style similar to a TED talk, mixing in animations and footage of smoke-belching factories and thick lines of traffic in China’s major cities.

As part of the film, he said, Chai took field trips to London and Los Angeles, and visited polluting factories to look at past instances where smog claimed thousands of lives. She took a “critical look at China’s over-reliance on dirty fossil fuels, its bloated heavy industries and its lax enforcement of environmental statutes”.

Under the Dome, by Chai Jing

The documentary breaks no new ground but what seems to have caught the public’s attention is the highly personal tone. Chai said she paid little attention to the smog engulfing much of China and affecting 600 million people, even as her work took her to places where the air was acrid with fumes and dust.

“I’d never felt afraid of pollution before, and never wore a mask no matter where,” Chai, 39, says in the video. “But when you carry a life in you, what she breathes, eats and drinks are all your responsibility, then you feel the fear.”

She has said her concerns about what the filthy air would mean for her infant daughter’s health prompted her to produce the documentary. Chai told the People’s Daily website that she decided to set aside worries about making her daughter the subject of a video. “If I had not had this kind of emotional impetus, I would have found it very difficult to spend such a long time completing this,” she told the website.

Guo wrote in Global Voices that as a well-known investigative reporter, Chai worked on features about China’s environmental problems. But since becoming pregnant in 2013 – and discovering her baby was carrying a benign tumour in her womb – pollution had become a more personal issue.

He said that Chai’s baby survived following surgery performed last year, but Chai was left shattered and unable to enjoy motherhood. She decided to leave China’s state broadcaster, CCTV, to take care of her daughter. Chai continued reporting, however, and her new film had struck a chord with a public increasingly worried by China’s smog problem.

There have been some critical comments. Chai and her husband were well-off enough for her to have given birth in the US and some commenters accused her of hypocrisy. Newspapers have quoted scientists who have challenged her suggestion in the video that smog affected her daughter’s health.

But most have welcomed her initiative in producing the documentary with her own money. Despite the criticism of government policy the video was not blocked. The website of People’s Daily, the main Communist party newspaper, was one of the first to post Under the Dome. By Sunday evening, however, popular Chinese websites had removed prominent headlines and links about Under the Dome from their front pages.

The new minister of environmental protection, Chen Jining, praised the video. He told Chinese reporters at a news conference in Beijing on Sunday that the documentary reminded him of Carson’s Silent Spring, which on publication in 1962 sparked a furore about excessive use of pesticides.

Guo reported that Chen said he “had already watched the documentary and sent a text message to Chai to thank her for raising public attention towards environmental issues, according to Chinese media reports”. Guo noted that at the annual sessions of the National People’s Congress in less than a week’s time, pollution was expected to be a prominent subject.

• This article was amended on 4 March 2015. An earlier version failed to attribute several sections to an article written by Owen Guo and published by Global Voices.