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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. 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. 0000023972 00000 n Andy Wong/AP !(^^\(c-RUFkEE Based on current rates, the countrys total population could reach up to 1.46 billion by 2028, resulting in even high amounts of waste. While more time is needed to analyse the bans impacts domestically, it has had rippling effects across global plastic pollution and management. How China's plastic waste ban forced a global recycling reckoning. 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. Kate Sheehy. 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. One night, family planning officials approached her husband, intending to pressure him and his wife into ending the pregnancy. In connection with this, the film represents a reflection on the legal status and living conditions of Chinas floating population (liudong renkou). 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. 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. 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. Directors Jiu-liang Wang Genres Documentary Subtitles English [CC] ", 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. Chen, the lawyer, mounted a class action lawsuit on behalf of Linyi's women. Meanwhile, mass urbanization and rural migration have changed the financial and social calculus, making . Wang is a recognised authority on the topic of waste in China. What was she hiding from? 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. She is especially protective of him. The limit in most cases was just one child. Updated. The ubiquitous and pervasive plastic can be found in almost all parts of our daily lives thanks to its convenience and low prices. Immediately afterwards, he embarked on a new project. "People act in funny ways," she says. Either the government is already losing faith in the reality of its implementation, or it needs a bigger budget for advertising. 0000001943 00000 n 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. 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 . A burning armoured personnel carrier on 4 June 1989, near Tiananmen Square. hide caption. Today, the world produces nearly 350 million tonnes of plastic waste, which is projected to double by 2040 if no action is taken. 0000017207 00000 n But there was tension amid the squalor, as the plant manager and his one employee clashed over the education and ambition of the employees 11-year-old daughter. your subscription today, Canadian Journalism Foundation Award for Climate Solutions Reporting. Made in China publications are open access and always available as a free download. 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. Married couples in China in 2016, were allowed to have two children, after concerns over an aging population and shrinking workforce ushered in an end to the country's controversial one-child policy. We promise, no spam! The U.S. used to send a lot of its plastic waste to China to get recycled. China implemented the policy of limiting each family to one child in 1979 to slow the growth of the country's population. 0000016680 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. 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. ! Wang recalled. Something doesn't add up here. Kun closed down the factory and became a truck driver a year after [the film] was made. 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. 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. 0000001781 00000 n 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. "Despite all the overwhelming demographic evidence, they're saying, 'We need to control you,'" says the author, Fong. 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. Officials in her village were actively policing families under the one-child policy. "These effects will be felt in the generation ahead. The daughter of a young plastic factory worker, Yi Jie, looks over a heap of plastic while cradling her baby sibling. It was vicious," he says. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. of plastic inputs in oceans while putting China at 7%. 9 U4W6}-+c\y^xu^`88^iY :\`PrAiSvF5f19/L2Jh206X Plastic China: Directed by Jiuliang Wang. Posted in Article, Work of Arts. 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. But starting in 2005, the authorities began enforcing the policy with a renewed ferocity in Linyi. 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. 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. One night in August 2008, the mother made a fateful decision. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. In conclusion, Plastic China constitutes a broad reflexion on social problems and dilemmas in the post-socialist era. It now collects its community's plastic trash and turns it into fuel. 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. Image by: Our World in Data. , 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. 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. 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. Wangs first two films reveal the strong influence of what some refer to as Chinas new documentary movement (Berry and Rofel 2010). For decades, China has relied on superficial policies targeting plastic to reduce waste in the country. November 15, 2022. Her worries these days are more mundane. After six months of getting to know two families who worked at one small plant, Wang was allowed intimate access to their lives. Her son is part of the last generation of children in China whose births were ruled illegal at the time. 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. By the container load, the cast-off plastic comes from Korea, Europe and the US. 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. When combined, the plastic pollution situation in China may seem bleak, raising fears of its monumental and possibly irreversible environmental damage and degradation. 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. That's up from 152 million ten years. China used to take much of it, but has banned imports of plastic waste so where does it now go? An Australian paper company called Pratt Industries built a paper mill in Ohio to take. 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 family, who lives near the city of Kunming in Yunnan province, adopted what . 0000021210 00000 n When I see the value in something, and its necessary to communicate it to a mass audience, any obstacles that might stop me, they dont exist, he said. Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. He has vowed to break with the past, and usher in a new normal (xin changtai)later morphing into a new era (xin shidai)in which the countrys true wealth would reside in clear waters and green mountains (lshui qingshan), and its prosperity would rely on moderate and sustainable growth. 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. A recent book helps explain how PRC leaders think about the . In the absence of any recognisably subversive content, I would argue that it was the image of China conveyed by Wangs bleak and shocking depiction of the countrys recycling sector that struck a nerve. 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. 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. HdU{PSW? 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. Mao Yin was snatched aged two, while his father stopped to get him some water on the way home. Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. 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 . Its river basin comprises one-fifth of the countrys land area, and supports and houses nearly one-third of the population. No one can afford that," she complains. ", 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. Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. They must be in middle school or high school by now.". 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. 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. So the mother went into hiding to carry her son to term. The Pengs precarious existence and the fact that they are basically left to fend for themselves is striking for both Chinese and foreign viewers. 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. . "Our main products are paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, mixed plastics . First of all his film tackles the problem of labour exploitation. "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. Yi-Jie is an 11-year-old girl who works and lives at a plastics recycling facility in the documentary "Plastic China." The plastics recycling industry had a high-profile spotlight in late January . 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. "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. 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. Not only does the country consume, at least one fifth of the worlds plastics. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, two major sellers of plastic bottles, have made sweeping sustainability commitments. Such a context makes it very risky for the latter to adopt a long-term perspective and invest in new equipment or techniques. ", A mother and a grandmother take care of a child in Beijing on Jan. 1, 2016. The . 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. A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste. Yet, something in Plastic China must have bothered Chinese censors, and prompted them to intervene. He lived in comfort and was treated preferentially by the Wei court. The Yangtze river, the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world, is an important water body in China. The rationale for implementing the policy was to reduce the growth rate of China's enormous population. Now the world is scrambling to adjust. Today's top India news headlines, news on Indian politics, elections, government, business, technology, and Bollywood. Yeah, in China you'll meet tons of people who had siblings born while the one-child policy was in effect. 0000439869 00000 n 0000024672 00000 n 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). Trailer for 'Plastic China' film by director Wang Jiuliang. 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. 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. 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. hide caption. 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. 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. what happened to the families in plastic china. 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