The people who had a stake in it did not welcome the shooting.. The Yangtze river, the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world, is an important water body in China. 0000017854 00000 n 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. 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. 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 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). 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. Midway through its annual session, China's ceremonial parliament is focusing on boosting the economy, building self-reliance in technology and further squeezing room for political opposition in Hong Kong. His mother watches him approvingly. 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). 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. 0000003242 00000 n Until there is a. "It has been so many years, and I have let the pain go," the mother of three says, eyes downcast. 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. 0000021210 00000 n 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. 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. The smiles that break across their grubby faces belie a bleak existence for the families that scrape by sorting plastic waste. 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. Today, the world produces nearly 350 million tonnes of plastic waste, which is projected to double by 2040 if no action is taken. Anxious that rapid population growth would strain the country's welfare systems and state-planned economy, the Chinese state began limiting how many children families could have in the late 1970s. Single-use plastics are also made almost entirely from fossil fuels. 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. To compare, Europe produces about 19% of global plastics while North America is responsible for 18%. 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 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. 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. AFP via Getty Images Experts warn of an increase in illegal dumping and incineration of plastics as prices for plastic scraps plummet in the wake of Chinas exit from the market it dominated. Today's top India news headlines, news on Indian politics, elections, government, business, technology, and Bollywood. 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. The target . 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). 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. 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. 0000020209 00000 n In China, plastic pollution is starkly evident . 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. Puren was the youngest brother of the final Qing monarch Puyi, who ruled for four years until 1912. 0000019453 00000 n 43 0 obj <> endobj xref 43 32 0000000016 00000 n 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 has been slow to completely dismantle its massive family planning bureaucracy built up over the past four decades. The question remains, however, whether this was worth the enormous sacrifice in financial security, and viewers are left wondering what will happen to the family if Wang Kun is diagnosed with a serious illness. This film debuted two years ago, but its relevance is striking in the wake of Chinas sudden refusal to continue importing foreign waste. There are two younger boys, Liu Zhuang, 5 and Liu Jian, 4, as well as newly born twin sisters. $2599 ($0.87/Count) Save more with Subscribe & Save. 0000000936 00000 n The success of the first film got Wang invited to California, where he toured recycling plants as part of his next round of research. There are over 5,000 little unregulated recycling plants in the town alone, giving Wang plenty of subject options. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. Plastic China: Directed by Jiuliang Wang. Chen had been persecuted and detained in China after his work advising villagers and speaking out official abuses under the one-child rule. He used a pickax to drive them off and was imprisoned for that for half a year. 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. China is also by far the largest source of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution. It was followed very selectively. 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). "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. 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. to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. 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. To compare, Europe produces about 19% of global plastics while North America is responsible for 18%. There is something profoundly disturbing in the Wangs purchase of a shiny new sedan car. Plastic films, plastic bags, the plastic wrapping that comes around a lot of packaged goods, that all goes into the garbage. However, the films relevance extends far beyond the issue of waste management. Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. 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. 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. Alex Wong/Getty Images 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. Han Dynasty Emperor Xian of Han, the last emperor of Han dynasty died as a duke. Wang is a recognised authority on the topic of waste in China. The . 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. 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. This means that people eating fish have also been consuming plastics. Some of them were located in rural recycling hubs, but many were not. 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. 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). 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. 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. For years, even social scientists have supported a widely held belief that Chinese . 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.. Giving birth to him was a huge risk and she took no chances. A further issue highlighted in the film is that of conspicuous consumption. This means that people eating fish have also been consuming plastics. The U.S. used to send a lot of its plastic waste to China to get recycled. All together, these measures are aligned with the countrys 2060 carbon neutrality targets. You need an active subscription to post a comment. This doesn't bode well for our plastic waste problem. 0000022087 00000 n hide caption. China had 1 million more births in 2016 than in 2015, following the end of the one-child policy. By the container load, the cast-off plastic comes from Korea, Europe and the US. For some, the pain is still too much to bear. A Chinese family has been forced to give up their pet dog after realizing they had actually adopted a black bear. Additionally, China currently tops the list of biggest greenhouse gas emitters though the US overtakes it for emissions per capita. When his wife became pregnant again, he hoped for a son,. 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. 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 families in plastic china. hide caption. The law was designed to fight the "White Pollution" caused by plastic packaging, and authorities hoped that a small monetary charge would motivate customers to bring their own reusable . 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. Officials in her village were actively policing families under the one-child policy. She is especially protective of him. "Women have it all figured out now they won't have more kids even when they're told to have more!" Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. By the time the reality show ended in 2007 after 52 episodes across four seasons it was tainted with low ratings and a lot of controversy. !(^^\(c-RUFkEE 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. 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. Chen, the lawyer, mounted a class action lawsuit on behalf of Linyi's women. Beijing seems to be neither "biding its time" nor rising peacefully. It all started with a mint julep on a hot summer day. 0000010125 00000 n They did not officially register the last two to avoid paying a fine, but the father says he still paid a bribe to family planning officials to avoid further harassment. 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. "There was also rapid urbanization, economic growth, industrialization, female emancipation and more female labor force participation. The limit in most cases was just one child. Summaries. 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. ", 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. 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. This change will not be easy, but it must be done. Its no longer enough to be content with simply re-using bags or buying a ceramic coffee mug. Some businesses have stepped up, too. 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. We desperately need large-scale investment into domestic recycling plants paired with less garbage being tossed aside every day by us, the ones who buy and discard, day in and day out. 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. A recent book helps explain how PRC leaders think about the . Families of people who died after contracting coronavirus in China's former epicentre Wuhan say they are constantly monitored and warned by authorities, who tell them speaking out will damage . When the inevitable collapse came, most of the companies went bankrupt, leaving city authorities having to pay to clean up the mess. 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. 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). "Despite all the overwhelming demographic evidence, they're saying, 'We need to control you,'" says the author, Fong. In the U.S. alone, some 26.7 million tons were sent out of the country between 1988 and. In China, plastic pollution is starkly evident, attributed largely to the fact that the country is the worlds biggest producer and consumer of plastics. Almost certainly, a proportion will have come from the homes, or more specifically the recycling bins, of Australia. 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). Either the government is already losing faith in the reality of its implementation, or it needs a bigger budget for advertising. "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. 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. "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. 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 He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's. These economic penalties depleted his life savings, a financial impact that compounded over the ensuing years. However, it is also strongly implied that Yijies gender played a role in her parents decision to neglect her education. 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. hide caption. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, two major sellers of plastic bottles, have made sweeping sustainability commitments. In conclusion, Plastic China constitutes a broad reflexion on social problems and dilemmas in the post-socialist era. "If you carry it with you all the time, it gets too tiring.". Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. 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. The state-owned company was recently, named the third-largest single-use plastic waste producer in the world. A familiar margarine packet among the mountains of rubbish in a backyard recycling facility on China. And in May, after a new census showed the birth rate had slowed, China raised the cap to three children. The film also resonated with the study of Chinas so-called informal recycling world that I conducted in the mid-2010s (Schulz 2018). 0000009053 00000 n Today, he lives in Maryland with his family. At that point, it was already the world's most populous country. A burning armoured personnel carrier on 4 June 1989, near Tiananmen Square. 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. Families were already having fewer children in the 1970s, before the policy took force in 1979. 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. 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. 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). But last year, China put the kibosh on . 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. 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. When combined, the plastic pollution situation in China may seem bleak, raising fears of its monumental and possibly irreversible environmental damage and degradation. The British colony simply. But even there Johnson found numerous stories of families going to great lengths . Products. 0000017207 00000 n 0000001204 00000 n trailer <<4243014C4E284DEB98C83941C307E81B>]/Prev 529831>> startxref 0 %%EOF 74 0 obj <>stream It followed reports in the Age last month that revealed thousands tonnes of soft. Yet the authorities still only allow couples to have three children. 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. Written on 17 January 2019. This targeted Boosting helps us to reach wider audiences aiming to convince the unconvinced, to inform the uninformed, to enlighten the dogmatic. 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. Yet, something in Plastic China must have bothered Chinese censors, and prompted them to intervene. After six months of getting to know two families who worked at one small plant, Wang was allowed intimate access to their lives. 0000002606 00000 n How much waste does China produce? Even if I had to go to prison and endure beatings, in the end, these children were able to survive. 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 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. Following Pen and his daughter Yi Jie, under the watchful eye of boss Kun, this film shows the lives of those harmed most by severe social inequality. A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste. The new documentary 'Plastic China' plunges into the dirty side of recycling. Much of the Western worlds waste was once bound for China. 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. We promise, no spam! Not only does the country consume at least one fifth of the worlds plastics, 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. Entirely from fossil fuels third-longest in the world & # x27 ; bode. Imprisoned for that for half a year much waste does China produce from the homes or., have made sweeping sustainability commitments Europe and the US overtakes it for emissions per capita around a of... Who worked at one small plant, Wang was allowed intimate access to their lives how leaders. 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