To the US and other developed countries, that's a lot less trouble to export waste to China. 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. 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. 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). 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 . On Jan. 1, China enacted new legislation allowing all married couples to have two children. The photographer-turned-director's debut documentary, 2011's Beijing Besieged by. It has been slow to completely dismantle its massive family planning bureaucracy built up over the past four decades. 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. China used to take much of it, but has banned imports of plastic waste so where does it now go? 0000010125 00000 n Chinese lawyer Chen Guangcheng attends a rally to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre June 4, 2019, at the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. 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 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. Summaries. 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. Such a context makes it very risky for the latter to adopt a long-term perspective and invest in new equipment or techniques. Additionally, China currently tops the list of biggest greenhouse gas emitters though the US overtakes it for emissions per capita. In this sense, Plastic China has arguably played a key role in the recent evolution of the trade in recyclable waste. In other words, though it looks good exteriorly, it has a lot of interior problems (Kanthor 2017). And so he set off to the rural region where he encountered a lot of resistance from those involved in the remedial waste management industry. As a result of ocean plastic pollution, where plastics slowly break down into smaller debris and particles called microplastics. Along the belt, human workers pick and channel what is valuable (bottles, cardboard, aluminium cans) into sorting chutes. The mother of one of these middle schoolers holds her son close. In this rugged hardpan of north China known for poverty and coal, Zhang Yi had but two frail daughters to help scratch out a living. Eight to 14 million tons of plastic waste ends up in oceans every single year, causing great harm to marine life, from accidental ingestion and entanglement, to increasing the risk of invasive species, which can throw entire ecosystems off balance. hide caption. Chinese parents, who have children born outside the country's one-child policy, protest outside the family planning commission in an attempt to have their fines canceled in Beijing, on Jan. 5, 2016. 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. 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. 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. Either the government is already losing faith in the reality of its implementation, or it needs a bigger budget for advertising. And I was carrying a camera, so it was especially tough at the beginning. 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. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. 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). 0000035786 00000 n Its massive local plastic production further contributes to Chinas lion share of global greenhouse emissions mainly from coal production. 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 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. In one interview about the film, Wang stated that: China is a country that is facelifted, concealed, faked and unnatural. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and . 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 portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste. 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. When combined, the plastic pollution situation in China may seem bleak, raising fears of its monumental and possibly irreversible environmental damage and degradation. 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. 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. It was featured in numerous festivals outside China, and has won several awards. When the inevitable collapse came, most of the companies went bankrupt, leaving city authorities having to pay to clean up the mess. But starting in 2005, the authorities began enforcing the policy with a renewed ferocity in Linyi. 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). 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. "This was not your average level of policy enforcement. Thus, in a way, Wang departs from the perspective of environmental dumping. She builds forts inside the recyclables and rifles through Western magazines, piecing together clues about life beyond the garbage and enriching it with fantasies. Our current pattern of manufacture, consume, discard is creating a chain of exploitation; it exploits the workers making our products, it exploits us through merciless advertising; and it exploits millions of poverty-stricken laborers working for a pittance like Kun and Peng in Plastic China. 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. It is against this backdrop that Plastic China came out in 2016. Updated. Twenty-something Kun is a hard worker with a dream of buying a new car to boost his social status. In another one, he explained, in reference to the films title that: The [word] plastic here has two meanings: first it refers to the plastic waste, but at a deeper level it refers to the weakness beneath our surface prosperity;the way plastic surgery only improves appearance, not the reality. Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images 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 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. $25,000 by April 5. Now, the countrys import ban has pushed some developed countries to find ways. It all started with a mint julep on a hot summer day. He came to the throne in 1908 at two-years-old and ruled until February 1912, when he was forced to abdicate. Some of them were located in rural recycling hubs, but many were not. 0000024672 00000 n Another monumental step China has taken to combat plastic pollution is its ban on recycling plastic imports in 2018. 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. So the mother went into hiding to carry her son to term. 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. 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. 0000003355 00000 n In China, rural migrants are generally registered in their place of origin but spend most of their time living far away from their hometowns. "Other doctors would artificially induce labor. 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. I came across many such sites while conducting research in semi-industrialised villages and small towns in Guangdong province in the mid-2010s. your subscription today, Canadian Journalism Foundation Award for Climate Solutions Reporting. Hand-picked stories once a fortnight. According to the report, his wife was forced to confess that before her marriage, she had spent 60,000 on plastic surgery in South Korea, and looked completely different to how she was born. 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. 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. Image by: Our World in Data. 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. Directors Jiu-liang Wang Genres Documentary Subtitles English [CC] Dr. Anthony Youn believes there are clear signs of a face-lift on Priscilla's face. I wanted to find out the origin of the garbage and realized that they were importing waste from the west and other developed countries, even in Asia, like Japan and Korea.. The success of the first film got Wang invited to California, where he toured recycling plants as part of his next round of research. The film premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in November 2016, and was shown at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. The daughter of a young plastic factory worker, Yi Jie, looks over a heap of plastic while cradling her baby sibling. The new documentary 'Plastic China' plunges into the dirty side of recycling. LINYI, China Outside, rain falls. 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. 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. 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. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. 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. What happened to the little girl in plastic China? 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. In connection with this, the film represents a reflection on the legal status and living conditions of Chinas floating population (liudong renkou). 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. It was featured in numerous festivals outside China, and has won several awards. A further issue highlighted in the film is that of conspicuous consumption. hide caption. 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. The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children. Much of the Western worlds waste was once bound for China. Parents were not penalized for having twins, at least not according to the letter of the law. By the container load, the cast-off plastic comes from Korea, Europe and the US. 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. 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. China has imported 45 percent of the world's plastic refuse since 1992, allowing many other countries, including the United States, to dodge the question of how to process the unwanted material, a . Even if I had to go to prison and endure beatings, in the end, these children were able to survive. But the country is not ignorant of its environmental impacts, and has moved to take more aggressive strides to combat this exponentially growing problem. ", 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. But Peng has no money, and anyway, Yi-Jie has to take care of her younger siblings and contribute to the recycling work. Wang is a recognised authority on the topic of waste in China. A familiar margarine packet among the mountains of rubbish in a backyard recycling facility on China. We all must initiate a seismic cultural shift that sees a serious slowing down of our relentless consumerism. She is especially protective of him. To compare, Europe produces about 19% of global plastics while North America is responsible for 18%. Global mismanaged waste in total. 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. Families were already having fewer children in the 1970s, before the policy took force in 1979. But last year, China put the kibosh on . Twenty years later, the volume of. First of all his film tackles the problem of labour exploitation. 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. 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. of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution. 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. In 2017, China collected 215 million tonnes of urban household waste, according to the country's statistical yearbook. And according to an Associated Press investigation, it continues to impose stricter controls over births including forced sterilizations among ethnic minorities, like the Turkic Uyghurs. 0000010492 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 . 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. 0000017207 00000 n A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste. 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. 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. It now collects its community's plastic trash and turns it into fuel. Election. Lu says he paid a 4,000 yuan fine to have his second son in 2006 (about $500 at the time), after hiding his wife for months. ". 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. This is regrettable, for two main reasons. Up to 60 per cent of Quebecs plastics went to China before its ban; Halifax is reportedly sending three hundred tonnes of plastic to landfill, and Calgary is sitting on five thousand tonnes of plastic waste, with all of that having gone to China in the past. Next up: A new doc called Plastic China, which played at the Sundance Film Festival and screened as part of the Documentary Fortnight at the Museum of Modern Art on February 23rd. In conclusion, Plastic China constitutes a broad reflexion on social problems and dilemmas in the post-socialist era. The brother of China's last emperor who was pushed off the throne more than 100 years ago has died. The smiles that break across their grubby faces belie a bleak existence for the families that scrape by sorting plastic waste. 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. The British colony simply. 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. 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. what happened to the families in plastic china. How China's plastic waste ban forced a global recycling reckoning. A Chinese couple whose son was abducted in a hotel in 1988 have been reunited with him after 32 years. With almost a spooky resemblance to Wildenstein, the Bogdanoff brothers - like her - are still injecting and filling into their seventies. Maybe we would care about the health of those living at the bottom of the social ladder if we were a part their lives for 90 minutes. 0000009529 00000 n Garbage collectors called rag and bone men ply the alleys of the cities, pedaling . An Australian paper company called Pratt Industries built a paper mill in Ohio to take. {&L Q4t)o('aJ. Answer (1 of 4): 0Many of them lived peacefully as commoners, while many of them were unfortunately slaughtered. 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. . China had 1 million more births in 2016 than in 2015, following the end of the one-child policy. Giving birth to him was a huge risk and she took no chances. 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. The U.S., Japan and Germany are all at the top of the list when it comes to exporting their used plastic. The . "Officials would kidnap you if you tried to have two children. B!$H BBAZ[:]nu+n:utvw=vvw9}#AaH"\mAnirF~'U44`~4w~gqci)kJ 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. hb```"qVta1 FsD While more time is needed to analyse the bans impacts domestically, it has had rippling effects across global plastic pollution and management. The U.S. used to send a lot of its plastic waste to China to get recycled. 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. For some, the pain is still too much to bear. One ton of unsorted waste was sold to China for about $9. of the plastic used in China is recycled in some shape or form. 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. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. We promise, no spam! , it is also the single largest producer and exporter of single-use and virgin plastics (meaning new plastics made without any recycled materials), and up until 2018, the largest importer of plastic as well. 43 0 obj <> endobj xref 43 32 0000000016 00000 n For decades, China's family planning policy limited most urban couples to one child and rural couples to two if their first was a girl. 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. 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 She demurs, her voice growing quiet. China boosts electric car fleet for public transport, Support award-winning independent journalism with In sum, China's exercise of power has been more hard than soft. These economic penalties depleted his life savings, a financial impact that compounded over the ensuing years. The target . But Chinas contribution to the global plastic crisis does not end there. 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. 0000035823 00000 n Environmental News, Data Analysis, Research & Policy Solutions. He rose to prominence a few years ago thanks to his first film, Beijing Besieged by Waste (laji weicheng, 2012), which revealed the existence of a great number of unauthorised and unmonitored dumpsites around Beijing. The news hit hard in the United States, which is home to about 60,000 children adopted from China, mostly girls. 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). trailer <<4243014C4E284DEB98C83941C307E81B>]/Prev 529831>> startxref 0 %%EOF 74 0 obj <>stream 0000001781 00000 n 0000016680 00000 n 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). "The policy was wrong and what we did with Chen was right," says a neighbor of Chen, the lawyer who sued the city of Linyi. 0000021210 00000 n 03:15. 0000017854 00000 n 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). Dr. Steven Svehlak and Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Payman Simoni agree. China Says It Will Allow Couples to Have 3 Children, Up From 2 The move is the Communist Party's latest attempt to reverse declining birthrates and avert a population crisis, but experts say it. 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. Something doesn't add up here. Ng Han Guan/AP 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. 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%. You need an active subscription to post a comment. But Kunwho is Han, from Shandong province, and can read and writerefuses, telling Wenyuan that he can always leave if he is not satisfied. Western worlds waste was sold to China to get recycled is valuable ( bottles, cardboard aluminium. That: China is a country that is facelifted, concealed, faked and unnatural past four decades it. And invest in new equipment or techniques Japan and Germany are all at 2017. 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