04:22. Her worries these days are more mundane. What could the family planning officials have done to her? All the issues mentioned above are central to Wangs narrative in Plastic China. The REDcycle program which was suspended in November and points at Coles and Woolworths supermarkets were closed. That's pushing policymakers to consider raising the official retirement age currently 60 for men and 55 for women for the first time in 40 years. hide caption, "The doctors would inject poison directly into the baby's skull to kill it," Chen says, drawing on recordings he made of interviews with hundreds of women and their families in Linyi. "This was not your average level of policy enforcement. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, plastic consumption has soared, adding an extra 25,900 tonnes of plastics in the ocean thats equivalent to more than 2,000 double decker buses. It was followed very selectively. 0000017854 00000 n The photographer-turned-directors debut documentary, 2011s Beijing Besieged by Waste, discovered the city-sized hills of garbage trucked to the outskirts of the Chinese capital, where displaced families lived in houses made of trash. 0000439869 00000 n Some demographers in China argue that instituting birth limits was necessary for keeping birth rates low. After six months of getting to know two families who worked at one small plant, Wang was allowed intimate access to their lives. 0000010492 00000 n However, implementation of this reform only begun several years into the shooting of Plastic China (which lasted from 2011 to 2016), and remains patchy to this day. When the inevitable collapse came, most of the companies went bankrupt, leaving city authorities having to pay to clean up the mess. However, the film is all too often reduced to its function as a tool for denouncing environmental dumping. But Peng has no money, and anyway, Yi-Jie has to take care of her younger siblings and contribute to the recycling work. The film has been particularly closely associated with the issue of waste imports since July 2017, when the Chinese central government hit headlines domestically and internationally by announcing a ban on imports of 24 categories of waste, including many types of plastics (Voice of America 2018). This means that people eating fish have also been consuming plastics. 0000035786 00000 n Wangs camera catches heartbreaking images of Jie, the preteen with a collapsing weight of responsibility on her young shoulders. With Plastic China, Wang aimed to raise awareness of his homelands role in the global waste trade, and expose its negative repercussions on the Chinese population and environment. hide caption. The . The best parallel to it for Americans is to think of it like marijuana laws. All together, these measures are aligned with the countrys 2060 carbon neutrality targets. The U.S. used to send a lot of its plastic waste to China to get recycled. Its massive local plastic production further contributes to Chinas lion share of global greenhouse emissions mainly from coal production. Now they are stepping away from a plastics lobbying . Yet, towards the end of the film, the Wangs spend their entire savingsand even borrow moneyto purchase a vehicle for which they seem to have little practical need. To compensate for this narrow focus, we need to look beyond the predominant reading. After recording only 213 deaths and about 13,000 cases of COVID-19 from January 2020 to early 2022, the city is swamped by the current Omicron wave, which began at the start of the year and has . The rationale for implementing the policy was to reduce the growth rate of China's enormous population. 0000035823 00000 n Additionally, China currently tops the list of biggest greenhouse gas emitters though the US overtakes it for emissions per capita. "All we can do is go on living," she says. It followed reports in the Age last month that revealed thousands tonnes of soft. Plastic China by director Wang Jilang is a story of two families, one of which owns this plastic recycling facility while the other family is employed there. And I was carrying a camera, so it was especially tough at the beginning. Today, the ongoing secrecy and censorship makes it impossible to know how many died that night. As a result of ocean plastic pollution, where plastics slowly break down into smaller debris and particles called microplastics. Acquiring this potent status symbol allows them to have the feelingand give others the impressionthat they have achieved wealth, and moved up the social ladder. Waste incineration capabilities are to be greatly increased, with the aim of reaching up to burning 800,000 tons of urban domestic waste per day by 2025. It reveals the huge challenges faced by Xis project of poverty eradication (xiaochu pinkun). trailer <<4243014C4E284DEB98C83941C307E81B>]/Prev 529831>> startxref 0 %%EOF 74 0 obj <>stream But Chinas contribution to the global plastic crisis does not end there. She is especially protective of him. "I thought this is it if I do not have this child, my body will not be able to have any more.". In the cinema version of Plastic China, the concept of labour exploitation applies more clearly within China and even among former peasants than it does between China and the highly industrialised countries from which waste is imported. She wants to start preparing for her son's marriage a costly endeavor as rural families expect the husband to provide a material guarantee for any future wife. Since 2014, Chinas household registration system (hukou) is being eased with a view to, among other things, give migrants better access to healthcare and education. Her body was giving her all the telltale signs that she was pregnant again. "Our main products are paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, mixed plastics . This also explains why Wang Kuns plastic recycling workshop, like many others, relies on manual labour and a couple of unsophisticated and antiquated machines. The family obviously lives on very little, and Wang Kun, the breadwinner, has a possibly serious affliction that affects his capacity to work, and remains undiagnosed and untreated, partly because he fears that seeking medical attention could result in high expenses. In the film, Peng Wenyuanwho comes from Sichuan province, belongs to the Yi ethnic group, and is almost illiteratecomplains repeatedly about his salary. He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's one-child policy. Director Jiu-Liang Wang refers to PLASTIC CHINA as a title which riffs on the idea of plastic surgerya way of masking the underlying physical truth of any given situation. Today, he lives in Maryland with his family. In March 2018, China's environment minister at the time, Li Ganjie, noted that China used to import around 4 to 4.5 million tons of solid, unrecyclable trash. On average, only about 17% of the plastic used in China is recycled in some shape or form. Ran Zheng for NPR (Liu 2014). This is regrettable, for two main reasons. The countrys populist leader, Premier Wen Jiabao, had the illegal ring of refuse sites investigated and then cleaned up, which was at once a major victory and just the beginning of Wangs dive into the dirty downside to Chinas capitalist surge. Many low-quality and contaminated materials are being redirected elsewhere including Africa and other Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia, which had arguably less capacity to prevent waste from contaminating their local environments. The . As a grownup in China, I share a responsibility of finding ways to make the country a better place to live., James Camerons attack on Netflix gets 2 major things wrong and one right, Missing is a worn out techno-thriller less exciting than a doomscroll, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes could be the reboot the franchise needs, By subscribing to this BDG newsletter, you agree to our. On July 16 that year, as Beijing was gearing up to hold the Summer Olympics, Zhang flagged the sudden increase of infant cases to his hospital's dean, who then reported them to the local health. Editor's note: This story contains descriptions that may be disturbing. 0000001781 00000 n 0000003355 00000 n This prompted the Chinese government to introduce a raft of new laws and regulations to limit plastic waste in 2020, and announced a plan for 2021 to 2025 which aims to further improve the management of the entire chain of plastic pollution. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. She picks out broken Barbie dolls and passes over Western product labels, a seemingly deliberate shot for Wang to remind viewers of the vastly different worlds between the kids who tossed those toys away and the ones on the other side of the world who pick them out of the trash to play with. Work done by environmentalists Chen Liwen and Mao Da from China Zero Waste Alliance (ling feiqi lianmeng) suggests that waste management is either lacking or highly inefficient in the Chinese countryside as a whole, and that much remains to be done in this field (Chitwood 2018). He was able to fly to the U.S. after weeks of tense negotiation. China implemented the policy of limiting each family to one child in 1979 to slow the growth of the country's population. While the ban has potentially helped China reduce its domestic plastic pollution, it barely made a dent in reducing global waste and instead, shifted the responsibility to other poorer countries. Immediately afterwards, he embarked on a new project. The film clearly belongs to Chinas new documentary movement, which has created an important space for social commentary and critique since the early 1990s (Berry and Rofel 2010). The seventh child, a boy, Liu Zhuang drowned at the age of five, and his mother says she cries every. While more time is needed to analyse the bans impacts domestically, it has had rippling effects across global plastic pollution and management. The global plastic pollution crisis continues to worsen every year. Through my interviews with self-made entrepreneurs who live in the countryside or have rural origins, I came to the conclusion that, as a rule, these people did not enjoy any support from state authorities for changing their methods or upgrading their facilities in order to cause less pollution, and better protect workers. But the country is not ignorant of its environmental impacts, and has moved to take more aggressive strides to combat this exponentially growing problem. Its river basin comprises one-fifth of the countrys land area, and supports and houses nearly one-third of the population. Much of the Western worlds waste was once bound for China. As a result of ocean plastic pollution, where plastics slowly break down into smaller debris and particles called microplastics, one study discovered that all 21 species of sea fish and freshwater fish from Chinese waters that were examined have ingested plastic. by China's decision to focus on domestic recycling in an effort to clean up their own landfills is a slap in the face to our First World consumer culture. That same year, he expressed his intention to undertake a follow-up project on waste imports beyond plastics, which he tentatively titled Dumping Ground of the World (shijie de laji chang) (Liu 2014). It is therefore not surprising that Plastic China is generally invoked, both within and outside of China, in connection with the global capitalist system that, for many years at least, allowed relatively rich countries to pass the burden of pollution on to China. 0000439946 00000 n Trailer for 'Plastic China' film by director Wang Jiuliang. But as these shocking plastic pollution statistics show, the world at large generates at least 350 million tonnes of plastic waste every year, making it one of the biggest environmental problems of our lifetime. The state-owned company was recently named the third-largest single-use plastic waste producer in the world, where in 2019, it reportedly churned out about 5.3 million tonnes of plastics. Single's Day, China's biggest online shopping holiday akin to Black Friday in the U.S. is a recognition of the many bachelors who are unable to find partners in a gender-skewed society. Despite this, plastic waste continues to soar partly due to the relatively low cost of plastic bags shoppers are therefore not deterred to pay for one and the rapid rise of e-commerce, and delivery services, resulting in mounting plastic packaging. Election. Based on current rates, the countrys total population could reach up to 1.46 billion by 2028, resulting in even high amounts of waste. Several experts I engaged with in recent months put forward the idea that the film prompted officials in Beijing to take this kind of action, or at least influenced them significantly (see also L 2018). Dr. Steven Svehlak and Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Payman Simoni agree. In 2020 alone, China produced about 60 million tonnes of plastic waste, yet only 16 million tonnes of which was recycled, according to the China National Resources Recycling Association. Her son is part of the last generation of children in China whose births were ruled illegal at the time. Plastic China (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ) is a 2016 Chinese documentary film depicting the lives of two families who make their living recycling plastic waste imported from developed countries. hide caption. CNN . Her job at a nearby canning factory refuses to hire her full time, she says, because she is a mother of three and needs to leave every afternoon to pick up her son from school. In the film we witness Kun and his family looking for a new car, despite the fact that their old family van continues to serve them fairly well. Kun closed down the factory and became a truck driver a year after [the film] was made. After all, this type of message is consistent with recent official discourse and practice, which lay great emphasis on environmental protection, leadership in global trade, and national sovereignty. 0000003466 00000 n Welcome to Wang Jiuliang's Plastic China, a quiet, intimate look into the lives of two Chinese families barely scraping a living by laboring at a small family run recycling plant. Plastic films, plastic bags, the plastic wrapping that comes around a lot of packaged goods, that all goes into the garbage. By the container load, the cast-off plastic comes from Korea, Europe and the US. https%3A%2F%2Fearth.org%2Fchina-plastic-pollution%2F. There is one obvious, clear, imperative measure that we all must make a priority- we must reduce the amount of plastics we use every day. 9 U4W6}-+c\y^xu^`88^iY :\`PrAiSvF5f19/L2Jh206X Despite this, plastic waste continues to soar partly due to the relatively low cost of plastic bags shoppers are therefore not deterred to pay for one and the, rapid rise of e-commerce, and delivery services. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. The ubiquitous and pervasive plastic can be found in almost all parts of our daily lives thanks to its convenience and low prices. Officials in her village were actively policing families under the one-child policy. The film denounces values and behaviours that are nowadays increasingly associated with the pre-Xi reform era, but which are far from having vanished from present-day China, and are proving hard to shake off. You might also like: Solution for Plastic Pollution: 6 Policies and Innovations Tackling Plastics, Featured image by: Sheila/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). 2a cmAAASDMn,!T+FrHV`)sbg:\8B@}Np(D3uOGh1.\8}) n"%UtZ-)9Kn>{b^xFrn{g(dX J1( O. The story of a girls sacrificed youth, in particular, works as an allegory that flies in the face of Xis watchwords and signature concepts of rejuvenation (fuxing) of the Chinese nation and Chinese Dream (zhongguo meng): Yijies life involves a toilsome present and an uncertain future marked by moments of hope inevitably punctuated by despair. Welcome to Wang Jiuliangs Plastic China, a quiet, intimate look into the lives of two Chinese families barely scraping a living by laboring at a small family run recycling plant. Chen, the lawyer, mounted a class action lawsuit on behalf of Linyi's women. Why won't China remove all caps? But Kunwho is Han, from Shandong province, and can read and writerefuses, telling Wenyuan that he can always leave if he is not satisfied. Yet the authorities still only allow couples to have three children. If you were hiding and they could not find you, they would kidnap your elder relatives and make them stand in cold water, in the winter," remembers Lu Bilun, a resident. Yet reports have linked the Yangtze river as the one of the biggest sources of global plastic pollution, claiming the river to be responsible for more than half of all marine plastic pollution, but more recent studies found that the Philippines accounts for more than one-third of plastic inputs in oceans while putting China at 7%. Indeed, they cut across borders and sectors of economic activity. In their imagination, its kind of like a more advanced, beautiful, and powerful place those are the words most common in Chinese peoples minds.. Puren was the youngest brother of the final Qing monarch Puyi, who ruled for four years until 1912. The film also alerted people in China to the dangers of haphazard waste management, and drew attention to the sheer mass of waste generated by a city the size of Beijing. hide caption. what happened to the families in plastic china. 0000001806 00000 n Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. Initially Feng. His mother watches him approvingly. Boss Kun and his workers separate plastics by burning samples and quickly sniffing the fumes, stimulating God only knows what kinds of cancers and brain damage. China boosts electric car fleet for public transport, Support award-winning independent journalism with The people who had a stake in it did not welcome the shooting.. 0000000936 00000 n Wangs first two films reveal the strong influence of what some refer to as Chinas new documentary movement (Berry and Rofel 2010). hide caption. During that time, imperial China was replaced by the Republic of China. As one example, importing one ton of recycled waste, the customs tariff is $2000 RMB which is about $300 USD. There is something profoundly disturbing in the Wangs purchase of a shiny new sedan car. India News | Latest India News | Read latest and breaking news from India. This is obvious in, among others, his choice of topic (Chinas economic growth and opening to the world as experienced by the countrys underclass), his relationships with subjects (long-term involvement, much like that of an anthropologist), and his cinematographic style (observational realism involving on-the-spot and spontaneous shooting, a director who stands behind the camera, and the absence of voiceover). %PDF-1.4 % When his wife became pregnant again, he hoped for a son,. Today, the world produces nearly 350 million tonnes of plastic waste, which is projected to double by 2040 if no action is taken. Since its release, the film has become indissociable from the issue of waste exports, and it gained even more prominence after July 2017, when the Chinese government announced a wide-ranging ban on foreign waste (yang laji) (Liebman 2018). Ng Han Guan/AP His mother watches him approvingly. The doctors strangled or drowned those babies.". If Plastic Chinas message really boiled down to nothing more than a plea against waste imports and the pollution they cause, then the film would not be an obvious target for the Chinese censors. This targeted Boosting helps us to reach wider audiences aiming to convince the unconvinced, to inform the uninformed, to enlighten the dogmatic. The plan also seeks to promote plastic alternatives such as bamboo, wood and paper (and scientific research into biodegradable plastics) over the next five years, as well as clearing plastic waste from key lakes and rivers, tourist attractions and rural areas. The new documentary 'Plastic China' plunges into the dirty side of recycling. But starting in 2005, the authorities began enforcing the policy with a renewed ferocity in Linyi. ! Wang recalled. NPR isn't using her name to protect her identity because of the trauma she suffered. We figured out that the waste wasnt necessarily Chinese waste, so I started to research what was behind this huge mountain of waste and all the dumping, and the fires, and smog, Wang told Inverse, through a translator, at Sundance. November 15, 2022. 0000019453 00000 n In recent years, crackdowns have become commonplace in rural recycling hubs, largely due to pressure from authorities at the county level and above, and they often cause recycling bosses to lose everything (Schulz forthcoming 2019). At some point, Wang Kun pushes for Yijie to attend a local kindergarten, even offering to cover the costs, yet Yijies father, Peng Wenyuan, refuses, preferring that she continue to sort plastics, do household chores, and take care of her younger siblings. Directors Jiu-liang Wang Genres Documentary Subtitles English [CC] A familiar margarine packet among the mountains of rubbish in a backyard recycling facility on China. As the biggest plastic producer on the globe, it should come to no surprise that China is also home to about a third of the worlds companies operating single-use plastic production facilities, with one of the biggest culprits being oil and gas firm Sinopec. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and . On Jan. 1, China enacted new legislation allowing all married couples to have two children. "A very unbalanced population gender-wise has also led to a rise in property prices in major cities because families of men have bought apartments to make their sons eligible in a marriage market where there are millions of missing women," says Mei Fong, who wrote a book on the one-child rule. Its river basin comprises one-fifth of the countrys land area, and supports and houses nearly one-third of the population. It has been ten months since China closed its doors to the world's recycling waste. The policy permeates through Chinese society in other, sometimes unexpected ways. In the U.S. alone, some 26.7 million tons were sent out of the country between 1988 and. One ton of unsorted waste was sold to China for about $9. An old friend of hers, the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, knows full well what she and tens of thousands of other women in Linyi city went through. Image by: Our World in Data. The insane volume of sorted scraps are pushed through a machine that turns the plastic into a gross, grey sludge before it is transformed into small grey pellets. Garbage collectors called rag and bone men ply the alleys of the cities, pedaling . First, this narrow focus fails to do justice to the richness and complexity of Wangs second, cinema version of Plastic China, whichunlike the first version targeting the pressconstitutes a broad social commentary and critique. Written on 17 January 2019. The mother of one of these middle schoolers holds her son close. Part of the reason she demurred when first speaking to NPR was because of how dearly her family fought for his birth. Almost certainly, a proportion will have come from the homes, or more specifically the recycling bins, of Australia. Beijing seems to be neither "biding its time" nor rising peacefully. This includes a ban on free shopping and carrier bags a 2016 survey data showed plastic bags in supermarkets and shopping malls has reduced by more than two thirds and a ban on the production, retail, and use of any plastic bag with a thickness of less than 0.025 mm. It has been slow to completely dismantle its massive family planning bureaucracy built up over the past four decades. of the plastic used in China is recycled in some shape or form. Thus, in a way, Wang departs from the perspective of environmental dumping. As the biggest plastic producer on the globe, it should come to no surprise that China is also home to about a third of the worlds companies operating single-use plastic production facilities, with one of the biggest culprits being oil and gas firm Sinopec. A burning armoured personnel carrier on 4 June 1989, near Tiananmen Square. He came to the throne in 1908 at two-years-old and ruled until February 1912, when he was forced to abdicate. One night, family planning officials approached her husband, intending to pressure him and his wife into ending the pregnancy. SCn ` ]-3 endstream endobj 44 0 obj <>>> endobj 45 0 obj <>/Font<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageC]/Properties<>/XObject<>>>/Rotate 0/TrimBox[0.0 0.0 595.276 841.89]/Type/Page>> endobj 46 0 obj [47 0 R] endobj 47 0 obj <>/Border[0 0 0]/H/N/Rect[248.776 776.077 346.366 766.333]/Subtype/Link/Type/Annot>> endobj 48 0 obj <> endobj 49 0 obj <> endobj 50 0 obj <> endobj 51 0 obj <> endobj 52 0 obj <> endobj 53 0 obj <>stream Families were already having fewer children in the 1970s, before the policy took force in 1979. There were virtually no incentives to comply with environmental and safety regulation, and local authorities made little effort to improve the sectorin large part because officials at the village or town level had a stake in rapid, unbridled economic growth. For decades, China has relied on superficial policies targeting plastic to reduce waste in the country. 43 0 obj <> endobj xref 43 32 0000000016 00000 n When asked about the dangers facing him, Wang just shrugged. He used a pickax to drive them off and was imprisoned for that for half a year. They take her elsewhere, to a place where she can picture a better life, andmost damning of allit looks like this could be abroad. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. In one interview about the film, Wang stated that: China is a country that is facelifted, concealed, faked and unnatural. to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. LINYI, China Outside, rain falls. While the ban has potentially helped China reduce its domestic plastic pollution, it barely made a dent in reducing global waste and instead, shifted the responsibility to other poorer countries. One night in August 2008, the mother made a fateful decision. 0000001315 00000 n Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, two major sellers of plastic bottles, have made sweeping sustainability commitments. 0000039672 00000 n Lu says the harassment became so savage that elderly residents of Linyi became afraid to leave their homes out of fear they might be kidnapped. Twenty-something Kun is a hard worker with a dream of buying a new car to boost his social status. For instance, Gurao, once Chinas largest bra manufacturing hub, struggles with waste-related pollution of comparable gravity to that of neighbouring Guiyu, the countrys infamous e-waste recycling capital. Not only does the country consume, at least one fifth of the worlds plastics. As a result, awareness of the social and environmental impact of the global trade in recyclables has increased substantially, both within and outside of China. Children ride a toy train at a shopping mall in Beijing, on Oct. 30, 2015. "It has been so many years, and I have let the pain go," the mother of three says, eyes downcast. When combined, the plastic pollution situation in China may seem bleak, raising fears of its monumental and possibly irreversible environmental damage and degradation. His focus on the daily life of two families in a shared domestic space, where exploitation unfolds in an intimate setting, allows him to give an otherwise commonplace phenomenon a particularly raw and emotional dimension. I saw the manager pointing to some of the garbage that was being sent out and saying, Those are going to China, and I said, what? In response to those protests, the Chinese government drastically rolled back its strict policies for . The Yangtze river, the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world, is an important water body in China. This doesn't bode well for our plastic waste problem. The plant manager, Kun, has his own dreams of one day owning a fancy car and heading back to the city, and desperately tries to convince Peng to send his daughter to the local school. Two of the more tragic examples - who were born identical twins and appear to be twinning themselves with duelling plastic surgeries - are French TV stars Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff. The low grade plastics normally sent to China consisted of plastic bags, food labels, coffee cups and more- all products that are normally used once before being tossed away. The aspect of the film that most stuck with me personally was how Plastic China depicted the poor standard of waste management in rural China. The problem The bike-sharing craze in China five years ago sucked in billions of dollars of investors' cash and clients' deposits that start-ups spent on millions of new bikes in an effort to grab market share. An important implication is that improving the lives of the people who live in rural recycling hubs and engage in waste sorting and processing requires more than putting an end to waste importsespecially if imports are substituted with domestic waste, of which there is no shortage in China. Yet, something in Plastic China must have bothered Chinese censors, and prompted them to intervene. Much like The Swan, a show that ran concurrently . The picture of Chinas gender regime that emerges from Plastic China is one of entrenched patriarchy, at least in the countryside, where boys are still valued more than girls (zhongnan qingn). HdU{PSW? This contrasts with the situation of Wang Qiqi, Kuns son, who is sent to the kindergarten so that he can pick up literacy skills early on in the hope that he will get access to a high-earning job later in life, ideally in an office in Beijingit should be noted, however, that Qiqi is not only a boy, but also an only child. However, the films relevance extends far beyond the issue of waste management. She carried her son to term while hiding in a relative's house. It forces us to re-examine our waste habits and confront the reality that every time we throw out our beloved Tim Hortons coffee cups, we are poisoning our environment at an alarming rate. In this essay, I argue that Plastic China should be considered as a rich social commentary and critique, and interpreted in the light of Chinas tradition of independent documentary-making in the reform era. The Pengs precarious existence and the fact that they are basically left to fend for themselves is striking for both Chinese and foreign viewers. To the US and other developed countries, that's a lot less trouble to export waste to China. Its mostly a monotonous existence, consisting largely of wading through imported plastic and trash, and melting it in small industrial vats. That part of the industry is very sensitive, and if you have nothing to do with them, you cant get in, Wang said. Among the films many harrowing scenes is that of Pengs wife giving birth to her fourth child in the Wangs garden, with what looks like a total absence of medical assistance. Ontario. 0000021210 00000 n No full, official . 60 Pieces Disposable Plastic Plates Set, Premium Plates for Parties with Real China Design, Red Plates Set - 30 x10.25 Inch Dinner and 30 x7.5 Inch Salad Hard Plates Combo (Warm Red) 189. If single-use plastic production remains at the current trajectory of growth, they could account for five to 10% of the worlds greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, further exacerbating climate change. "Officials would kidnap you if you tried to have two children. "Our country's leaders did not want us to have children and I didn't know why, but we could not do anything about it," he sighs. Moreover, Plastic China contains virtually no direct criticism of any government, state-owned enterprise, or other powerful entitya key difference with Under the Dome (qiong ding zhi xia 2015), another documentary on Chinas environmental predicament that also went viral and disappeared from the Internet in a matter of days. Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. Global plastic waste generation by country. Posted in Article, Work of Arts. This film debuted two years ago, but its relevance is striking in the wake of Chinas sudden refusal to continue importing foreign waste. Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. "These effects will be felt in the generation ahead. State media celebrated the news. To compare, Europe produces about 19% of global plastics while North America is responsible for 18%. . The whenever is ambiguous, as his 11-year-old daughter Yi Jie tells the camera that hes been promising to send her to school since she was five. After 25 years as the world's salvage king, China refused to buy any recycled plastic scrap that wasn't 99.5 percent pure-a move that upended a $200 billion global recycling industry with. New York CNN Business . The U.S., Japan and Germany are all at the top of the list when it comes to exporting their used plastic. The prosperity of Chinas coastal regions relies on a massive inflow of migrant workers from the interior, who rarely have much bargaining power regarding their working conditions. Years of rapid growth have made China appear prosperous, but pollution is having a huge impact on health while Chinas growth appears incredible, it is actually cheap and fragile. We promise, no spam! But the legacy of the one-child rule is still painfully felt by many parents who suffered for having multiple children. Some scenes in the film take place in a dumpsite, where waste is burned in the open, or next to a river, where it accumulates. Medical staff massage babies at an infant care center in Yongquan, in Chongqing municipality, in southwest China, on Dec. 15, 2016. ", A man and a child are reflected on a glass panel displaying a tiger at the Museum of Natural History in Beijing, Dec. 2, 2016. The LEGO Foundation is awarding a total of DKK 900 million (approximately US$ 117 Million) to support organisations that make substantial contributions to the lives of children from birth to six years old and spark a global movement to prioritise early childhood development. "There is no use in trying to make sense of society. Second, this prevents us from understanding why the film was censored in China, when the denunciation of waste imports actually fits with the Chinese states increasingly restrictive policies on this issue since the 2010s. one of the fairly recent ancesto. His research explores Chinas state project of ecological modernisation from the angle of e-waste reuse and recycling. It was announced in late 2015 that the program was to end in early 2016. It is against this backdrop that Plastic China came out in 2016. In 2017, China collected 215 million tonnes of urban household waste, according to the country's statistical yearbook. Ng Han Guan/AP Twenty years later, the volume of. Even before China's ban, only 9 percent of discarded plastic was being recycled, while 12 percent was burned. Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. Following the accepted narrative about China, its citizens might be expected to worship sons and disdain daughters. siQ6_{#WP(*K9-4GF(NTZ,GI2RV#PF"@(!9BI-$(E^D]ut(nK Jgu")( D)" Now, the countrys import ban has pushed some developed countries to find ways. 0000001943 00000 n She builds forts inside the recyclables and rifles through Western magazines, piecing together clues about life beyond the garbage and enriching it with fantasies. The weeklong meeting of the National People's Congress, which rubber stamps policies approved by the Communist Party leadership, provides a window into government priorities. This has lead to a major shift in China, family is now seen as the 3 living generations . Whats more, about 91% of all plastic that has ever been made is not recycled, meaning that plastic which can take up to 500 years to decompose keeps accumulating and degrading our natural environments. While more time is needed to analyse the bans impacts domestically, it has had rippling effects across global plastic pollution and management. So the mother went into hiding to carry her son to term. It is important to stress that, while these features of Chinas contemporary condition can be observed in rural recycling hubs, they are not unique to these places. Then in 2016, the state allowed two children. ". First of all his film tackles the problem of labour exploitation. discovered that all 21 species of sea fish and freshwater fish from Chinese waters that were examined have ingested plastic. The film also resonated with the study of Chinas so-called informal recycling world that I conducted in the mid-2010s (Schulz 2018). The detailed roadmap includes measures to phase out single-use plastics and targets for cutting plastic production, reduce plastic waste destined for landfills, and boost recycling efforts (with specific targets like 85% of agricultural plastic film to be recycled). Some businesses have stepped up, too. Some of them were located in rural recycling hubs, but many were not. hide caption. He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the China Centre, University of Oxford. ", A mother and a grandmother take care of a child in Beijing on Jan. 1, 2016. Andy Wong/AP It is very clear that the families are living in unregulated, shockingly toxic environments generating severe impacts on the outside world; throughout the film we see such a staggering amount of garbage that a shot of sheep and a patch of plastic-strewn grass seems oddly out-of-place. He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's. But Chinas contribution to the global plastic crisis does not end there. She already had two children and had gone through four abortions afterward, to avoid paying the ruinously high "social maintenance fee" demanded from families as penalty when they contravened birth limits. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. They dont know how the United States really is, because all they have received is information from Chinese TV, which is made by the Ministry of Media, Wang said. Boost this article Single-use plastics are also made almost entirely from fossil fuels. Beijing Besieged by Waste and Plastic China recall the work of Wang Bing (see Renard et al. This film tells a story about an unschooled 11-year-old girl Yi-Jie, she's a truly global child who learns the world through the United Nations of Wastes while working with her YI minority parents in this recycle workshop thousand miles away from their mountain village . Landfills stretch out endlessly, enormous hills of colourful plastic bottles loom in the distance, and what we can only presume to be toxic water run-off from the factory is what Jie uses to wet her hair before she brushes it. "There is no point in controlling them. In 2016, the Ontario government released its Strategy for a Waste-Free Ontario, diverting our wasteful ways towards a completely circular economy (zero-waste) by 2050. According to the census conducted last year, the population is aging and there are fewer young children and working-age people, a major demographic shift that comes with its own economic strains. Bright-eyed children run between heaping piles of plastic, a worn-out worker spends his meager wages on alcohol, and a preteen girl gazes solemnly at Western product advertisements she picks out of the monstrous piles of trash around her home. The young girl would love to visit the United States, but shed settle for going to school something her father, Peng, an alcoholic who works for the plant manager, has no interest in making happen. Just like Beijing Besieged by Waste, the movie uncovers a gnarly scene beyond the cosmopolitan city. The rest was buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and . Katherine Martinko is a writer and expert in sustainable living. From Jun 1 of that year, customers began to be charged for plastic shopping bags, and a total ban of ultrathin (less than 0.025mm thick) bags came into action. The main character is the employee's daughter, who never gets sent to school because she is helping her parents watch her younger siblings and sort through mountains of shredded plastic. $25,000 by April 5. In connection with this, the film represents a reflection on the legal status and living conditions of Chinas floating population (liudong renkou). 0000009529 00000 n She is especially protective of him. Yet, have linked the Yangtze river as the one of the biggest sources of global plastic pollution, claiming the river to be responsible for more than half of all marine plastic pollution, but more recent studies found that the, Philippines accounts for more than one-third. Either the government is already losing faith in the reality of its implementation, or it needs a bigger budget for advertising. Hand-picked stories once a fortnight. One first reason why Plastic China should be considered as a comprehensive reflection on the contemporary condition in China is that this is consistent with the directors intention. For some, the pain is still too much to bear. No one can afford that," she complains. But some babies were alive when they were born and began crying. Please help us make our goal! In this sense, Plastic China has arguably played a key role in the recent evolution of the trade in recyclable waste. The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children. "Other doctors would artificially induce labor. But the Chinese government punished Chen for his activism by imprisoning him, then trapping him for nearly three years in his home, in a village just outside Linyi. Chinas decision to focus on domestic recycling in an effort to clean up their own landfills is a slap in the face to our First World consumer culture. Once again, though, Wang has a holistic way of tackling the issue, and his real concern is Chinas changing relationship to the land under capitalisma broad project if there ever was one. Trailer for 'Plastic China' film by director Wang Jiuliang. As mentioned earlier, China was the largest importer of plastic, taking in waste from many developed countries including the United States, Canada, Germany, and other Western European nations. It was featured in numerous festivals outside China, and has won several awards. 0000018669 00000 n 0000023972 00000 n The terror of such enforcement of birth limits was widespread in Linyi, even if residents were not themselves planning on giving birth. Its actually incredible that the film, which calls into question the Chinese governments devotion to environmentalism and the welfare of its people, actually made it out of the country. 0000023031 00000 n Since the first protest on Nov. 26th, demonstrations popped up in every area of the country. The Qing . By donating us $100, $50 or subscribe to Boosting $10/month we can get this article and others in front of tens of thousands of specially targeted readers. This includes a ban on free shopping and carrier bags a. showed plastic bags in supermarkets and shopping malls has reduced by more than two thirds and a ban on the production, retail, and use of any plastic bag with a thickness of less than 0.025 mm. A Chinese family has been forced to give up their pet dog after realizing they had actually adopted a black bear. Municipalities across Canada are struggling under the weight of the rapidly accumulating plastics with no plan in place to deal with them, and it will continue to worsen if we keep living the way we have been. What is certain is that the film can serve as a justification for the outright ban on waste importsirrespective of whether Wang ever regarded a ban as the proper solution to the problems he documented in his film. Last October, Jian Feng, a man reportedly from northern China, sued and divorced his wife after she had a daughter who was "incredibly ugly" and did not resemble either parent. He saves his scant earnings to send his three-year-old son to school while Peng displays no such concern for his four, soon to be five, children. There are clear signs that this space is shrinking nowadays, yet this does not stop many independent filmmakers from pursuing their mission (Berry 2017). What happened to the little girl in plastic China? The smiles that break across their grubby faces belie a bleak existence for the families that scrape by sorting plastic waste. With almost a spooky resemblance to Wildenstein, the Bogdanoff brothers - like her - are still injecting and filling into their seventies. Along the belt, human workers pick and channel what is valuable (bottles, cardboard, aluminium cans) into sorting chutes. But Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, cautions there is no definitive answer. Where Wang achieves sentimentality and awareness at displaying his subjects somber existence, he fails in giving his audience any objective information about the health, social, or environmental impacts of the Chinese recycling process. During the reform era, this has prevented them from enjoying key rights and public services in their place of residence. 0000009053 00000 n 0000024672 00000 n Wangs second film, Plastic China, depicts the life of two families of former peasants who make a living by recycling plastic waste of foreign origin in Shandong Province, and emphasises their wretched living and working conditions. 0000001204 00000 n It is a moment that for many observers has come to define strongman leader Xi Jinping's tightening grip on China: his visibly frail predecessor, Hu Jintao, being escorted out of . We all must initiate a seismic cultural shift that sees a serious slowing down of our relentless consumerism. Back in the 1960s, more than 100 children - mostly abandoned, mostly babies and mostly girls - were brought over from Hong Kong to be adopted by British families. "Women have it all figured out now they won't have more kids even when they're told to have more!" In China recycling is done by the trash collectors who specialize in different kinds of refuse rubber, aluminum, tin, plastic, paper and either collect these materials by going house to house or sort through the garbage, selling what they find to traders. "There was also rapid urbanization, economic growth, industrialization, female emancipation and more female labor force participation. Since taking office as president, Xi Jinping has striven to distinguish his government from the previous one. In the 1990s, he says, family planning officials ambushed him in his home at night and beat him with sticks in an effort to convince his wife to abort their third son. Priscilla Presley before and after (Source: Radar Online) Experts reckon that the 77-year-old has likely had cheek and lip fillers, skin resurfacing treatments, and a face-lift. Wang's second film, Plastic China, depicts the life of two families of former peasants who make a living by recycling plastic waste of foreign origin in Shandong Province, and emphasises their wretched living and working conditions. In conclusion, Plastic China constitutes a broad reflexion on social problems and dilemmas in the post-socialist era. 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