All the issues mentioned above are central to Wangs narrative in Plastic China. 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. 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). In the last two years, the issue of waste exports to China has attractedconsiderable mediaand public attention. We all must initiate a seismic cultural shift that sees a serious slowing down of our relentless consumerism. It was featured in numerous festivals outside China, and has won several awards. "It has been so many years, and I have let the pain go," the mother of three says, eyes downcast. The film does not tell its audience how this situation came about, but it is easy to associate it with rural migrants generally limited access to healthcare. Ng Han Guan/AP Dr. Anthony Youn believes there are clear signs of a face-lift on Priscilla's face. Without a fundamental cultural shift in our societys grievous over-use of plastic, we will see the same mountains of scraps growing in our pristine backyards just like Peng, Kun, and Yi Jie see everyday. But Kunwho is Han, from Shandong province, and can read and writerefuses, telling Wenyuan that he can always leave if he is not satisfied. "This was not your average level of policy enforcement. It followed reports in the Age last month that revealed thousands tonnes of soft. As research on plastic and its detriments on the environment increasingly pop up on our news feeds, its obvious that weve reached a breaking point. This means that people eating fish have also been consuming plastics. Wang turned his focus to imported plastic, and after some digging, learned that it was being brought to a little town in the province of Shandong, along the coast. Yvan Schulz obtained his PhD from the Anthropology Institute, University of Neuchtel in February 2018. :v9s];"vE\ j{G=vs=_qq/w?/uynBRBViW)42xP.itM"2HX SJXr/^$,^J_gHIum1$OL@*R*06T4W*[>ypNA-y6J]yPW6VV In other words, though it looks good exteriorly, it has a lot of interior problems (Kanthor 2017). This brings us to the topic of censorship. It now collects its community's plastic trash and turns it into fuel. Another factor that justifies adopting a broad interpretation of Plastic China is the wide range of social issues addressed by Wang. A magazine advertisement for the Sandals Resorts looks like paradise; catalogs with computer parts offer up opportunities to build paper versions of electronics she could never afford. 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. There are clear signs that this space is shrinking nowadays, yet this does not stop many independent filmmakers from pursuing their mission (Berry 2017). He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's one-child policy. Puren was the youngest brother of the final Qing monarch Puyi, who ruled for four years until 1912. The seventh child, a boy, Liu Zhuang drowned at the age of five, and his mother says she cries every. So the mother went into hiding to carry her son to term. 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. Plastic films, plastic bags, the plastic wrapping that comes around a lot of packaged goods, that all goes into the garbage. 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 ambitious plan requires the full participation of producers to consumers and is an inspirational idea, though I hadnt even heard of it before digging through plastic research, and it doesnt seem to be very widely discussed. In China, plastic pollution is starkly evident . Its river basin comprises one-fifth of the countrys land area, and supports and houses nearly one-third of the population. It was featured in numerous festivals outside China, and has won several awards. 0000439869 00000 n While more time is needed to analyse the bans impacts domestically, it has had rippling effects across global plastic pollution and management. 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. November 15, 2022. Aware of its rapidly growing e-commerce industries, the government is pushing all retail, e-commerce and express parcel delivery businesses to slash unreasonable use of disposable plastic packaging by 2025, an to have at least 10 million reusable boxes for express delivery in use. 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. In June 2020, directed remotely by their parents in Italy and a cousin in Canada, the four siblings - then aged between 11 and 16 - traveled from their remote village in Xinjiang all the way to. By the container load, the cast-off plastic comes from Korea, Europe and the US. Mao's attempts to remove the family from the center of Chinese life ultimately failed, but not before destroying a few aspects of traditional culture. Her worries these days are more mundane. 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. 0000018669 00000 n 0000000936 00000 n Yi-Jie, who lives in a spare room at the plant with her parents and siblings, spends her days working and constructing imaginary worlds atop the piles of trash that cover the ground. 9 U4W6}-+c\y^xu^`88^iY :\`PrAiSvF5f19/L2Jh206X 0000001943 00000 n 0000009529 00000 n China is also by far the largest source of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution. With almost a spooky resemblance to Wildenstein, the Bogdanoff brothers - like her - are still injecting and filling into their seventies. 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 hide caption. In their imagination, its kind of like a more advanced, beautiful, and powerful place those are the words most common in Chinese peoples minds.. Ontario. 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. CNN . 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. 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. The rest was buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and . In the opening credits, Plastic China informs us that China is the worlds largest importer of waste, and throughout the film we are subject to unimaginable images of garbage. The new documentary 'Plastic China' plunges into the dirty side of recycling. The global plastic pollution crisis continues to worsen every year. Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. 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. This is regrettable, for two main reasons. His mother watches him approvingly. 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. INVERSE 2023 BDG Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Until there is a. Katherine Martinko is a writer and expert in sustainable living. 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. You need an active subscription to post a comment. She wanted to avoid the "family planning officials" in her home village, just outside Linyi, a city of 11 million in China's northern Shandong province, where the policy's enforcement was especially violent. The ban was initiated in January of this year and undoubtedly the shockwaves are being felt in the international community as countries look to Asia for another foreign landfill. 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. He was able to fly to the U.S. after weeks of tense negotiation. Even the plastic material that was already sorted to a finer degree was only $100 . It is against this backdrop that Plastic China came out in 2016. She demurs, her voice growing quiet. In conclusion, Plastic China constitutes a broad reflexion on social problems and dilemmas in the post-socialist era. 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. Interestingly, it does not look further into waste imports, as Wang had originally planned, but instead addresses construction and real estates impact on the surface of the earth, in particular through mineral extraction and the desolate landscapes it produces in China (Wang 2016). ". Now, the countrys import ban has pushed some developed countries to find ways to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. 0000003791 00000 n Get focused newsletters especially designed to be concise and easy to digest. 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. Some businesses have stepped up, too. https%3A%2F%2Fearth.org%2Fchina-plastic-pollution%2F. It was announced in late 2015 that the program was to end in early 2016. One night in August 2008, the mother made a fateful decision. 0000439946 00000 n 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. 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. However, the film is all too often reduced to its function as a tool for denouncing environmental dumping. 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. hb```"qVta1 FsD What is the current state of plastic pollution in China and how does the country deal with it? The . 0000010125 00000 n Twenty years later, the volume of. "There is no use in trying to make sense of society. But Chinas contribution to the global plastic crisis does not end there. The rationale for implementing the policy was to reduce the growth rate of China's enormous population. Andy Wong/AP I came across many such sites while conducting research in semi-industrialised villages and small towns in Guangdong province in the mid-2010s. 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 . of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution. 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. Beijing seems to be neither "biding its time" nor rising peacefully. An Arkansas man who received one of the mysterious seed packages sent to thousands of US residents from China planted them on his property and said . In 2014, Wang released an early, less narrative but more explanatory version of his documentary addressed at the media, in which he clearly frames the issue as environmental dumping. When combined, the plastic pollution situation in China may seem bleak, raising fears of its monumental and possibly irreversible environmental damage and degradation. A familiar margarine packet among the mountains of rubbish in a backyard recycling facility on China. Climate. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. WUHAN, China Zhang Hai has a warning to World Health Organization-led scientists researching the origin of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China: Don't be fooled. A Chinese family has been forced to give up their pet dog after realizing they had actually adopted a black bear. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. 0000016680 00000 n 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. 0000039672 00000 n The British colony simply. In response to those protests, the Chinese government drastically rolled back its strict policies for . AFP via Getty Images Additionally, China currently tops the list of biggest greenhouse gas emitters though the US overtakes it for emissions per capita. China implemented the policy of limiting each family to one child in 1979 to slow the growth of the country's population. China is also by far the. Its a moving film about the individuals left to deal with the First Worlds trash, and while I enjoy documentaries that throw big, scary facts at me, I believe Wang omitted some objective information for a reason. Medical staff massage babies at an infant care center in Yongquan, in Chongqing municipality, in southwest China, on Dec. 15, 2016. The fact that the children are alive at all makes Chen, the lawyer, feel his seven years in prison and house arrest were all worth it. Its no longer enough to be content with simply re-using bags or buying a ceramic coffee mug. 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. Based on current rates, the countrys total population could reach up to 1.46 billion by 2028, resulting in even high amounts of waste. 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. On average, only about 17% of the plastic used in China is recycled in some shape or form. 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. trailer <<4243014C4E284DEB98C83941C307E81B>]/Prev 529831>> startxref 0 %%EOF 74 0 obj <>stream hide caption. She carried her son to term while hiding in a relative's house. what happened to the families in plastic china. When his wife became pregnant again, he hoped for a son,. 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? Plastic China 's portrait of a migrant worker and his family, and the factory's ambitious owner, is touching and saddening, and puts a human face on the problems caused by China's rush to. 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. What could the family planning officials have done to her? For some, the pain is still too much to bear. hide caption. 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. But even there Johnson found numerous stories of families going to great lengths . In China, the film went viral in January 2017 before quickly disappearing from the Internetthereby following a pattern that affects most of Wangs work (Zhao 2017). Ng Han Guan/AP In these excerpts, one finds a clear criticism, expressed in rather general terms, of Chinas development model during the reform era, especially the pursuit of wealth at all costs. This film debuted two years ago, but its relevance is striking in the wake of Chinas sudden refusal to continue importing foreign waste. Trailer for 'Plastic China' film by director Wang Jiuliang. Yeah, in China you'll meet tons of people who had siblings born while the one-child policy was in effect. Boost this article Kun closed down the factory and became a truck driver a year after [the film] was made. The news hit hard in the United States, which is home to about 60,000 children adopted from China, mostly girls. But Peng has no money, and anyway, Yi-Jie has to take care of her younger siblings and contribute to the recycling work. Andy Wong/AP 0000001806 00000 n The mother of one of these middle schoolers holds her son close. A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste. 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. 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. Image by: Our World in Data. 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. 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. This also explains why Wang Kuns plastic recycling workshop, like many others, relies on manual labour and a couple of unsophisticated and antiquated machines. Summaries. Just like Beijing Besieged by Waste, the movie uncovers a gnarly scene beyond the cosmopolitan city. 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. But the country is not ignorant of its environmental impacts, and has moved to take more aggressive strides to combat this exponentially growing problem. The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children. In 2017, China collected 215 million tonnes of urban household waste, according to the country's statistical yearbook. In 2012, Chen escaped by scaling a wall and running to the next village, despite being blind and having broken his foot during the escape. 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. A recent book helps explain how PRC leaders think about the . 0000009053 00000 n When the ancestral temples were destroyed most families lost the records of their extended family. 0000001315 00000 n Trailer for 'Plastic China' film by director Wang Jiuliang. ", A child walks near government propaganda one of which reads "1.3 billion people united" on the streets of Beijing, China, Tuesday, March 8, 2016. He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's. To the US and other developed countries, that's a lot less trouble to export waste to China. Part of the reason she demurred when first speaking to NPR was because of how dearly her family fought for his birth. 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. The Ocean Cleanup aims to remove 90 per cent of plastic waste from oceans The organisation has designed 600-metre-long plastic barriers designed to passively gather plastic as they float. This has lead to a major shift in China, family is now seen as the 3 living generations . 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. But last year, China put the kibosh on . Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. That part of the industry is very sensitive, and if you have nothing to do with them, you cant get in, Wang said. 2a cmAAASDMn,!T+FrHV`)sbg:\8B@}Np(D3uOGh1.\8}) n"%UtZ-)9Kn>{b^xFrn{g(dX J1( O. 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