"There is only one China and there is only one one-child policy, so it is kind of impossible to say the real effect of that was [of the policy]," he says. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, two major sellers of plastic bottles, have made sweeping sustainability commitments. 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. If we do nothing and continue to turn our beautiful world into a Wall-E-esque nightmare, then the fate of our civilization will be suicide by garbage. 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. 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. As a result of ocean plastic pollution, where plastics slowly break down into smaller debris and particles called microplastics, one study discovered that all 21 species of sea fish and freshwater fish from Chinese waters that were examined have ingested plastic. 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 . 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. For decades, China has relied on superficial policies targeting plastic to reduce waste in the country. Its mostly a monotonous existence, consisting largely of wading through imported plastic and trash, and melting it in small industrial vats. 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. 43 0 obj <> endobj xref 43 32 0000000016 00000 n When the inevitable collapse came, most of the companies went bankrupt, leaving city authorities having to pay to clean up the mess. Hand-picked stories once a fortnight. It followed reports in the Age last month that revealed thousands tonnes of soft. Posted in Article, Work of Arts. 0000019453 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. She babysits, cooks, works and teaches her three younger siblings while her parents do the same back-breaking work day in and day out. All the issues mentioned above are central to Wangs narrative in Plastic China. In China, rural migrants are generally registered in their place of origin but spend most of their time living far away from their hometowns. Children ride a toy train at a shopping mall in Beijing, on Oct. 30, 2015. 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 . Image by: Our World in Data. 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. Many low-quality and contaminated materials are being redirected elsewhere including Africa and other Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia, which had arguably less capacity to prevent waste from contaminating their local environments. The target . 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. Dr. Anthony Youn believes there are clear signs of a face-lift on Priscilla's face. 2a cmAAASDMn,!T+FrHV`)sbg:\8B@}Np(D3uOGh1.\8}) n"%UtZ-)9Kn>{b^xFrn{g(dX J1( O. The terror of such enforcement of birth limits was widespread in Linyi, even if residents were not themselves planning on giving birth. "It has been so many years, and I have let the pain go," the mother of three says, eyes downcast. This doesn't bode well for our plastic waste problem. Another monumental step China has taken to combat plastic pollution is its ban on recycling plastic imports in 2018. Following the accepted narrative about China, its citizens might be expected to worship sons and disdain daughters. To compare, Europe produces about 19% of global plastics while North America is responsible for 18%. "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. 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. 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. Until there is a. 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. 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. 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. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. 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. We all must initiate a seismic cultural shift that sees a serious slowing down of our relentless consumerism. "Women have it all figured out now they won't have more kids even when they're told to have more!" of the plastic used in China is recycled in some shape or form. The whenever is ambiguous, as his 11-year-old daughter Yi Jie tells the camera that hes been promising to send her to school since she was five. That was a period where China's growth started booming. 9 U4W6}-+c\y^xu^`88^iY :\`PrAiSvF5f19/L2Jh206X 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. 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. Officials in her village were actively policing families under the one-child policy. Global mismanaged waste in total. While more time is needed to analyse the bans impacts domestically, it has had rippling effects across global plastic pollution and management. This means that people eating fish have also been consuming plastics. Families were already having fewer children in the 1970s, before the policy took force in 1979. 0000003466 00000 n Election. One ton of unsorted waste was sold to China for about $9. China has been taking US plastic waste for three decades. 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. 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. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. It was featured in numerous festivals outside China, and has won several awards. He asks Wang Kun, his boss and the owner of the recycling workshop the Pengs work in, for a raise. These economic penalties depleted his life savings, a financial impact that compounded over the ensuing years. 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 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). A familiar margarine packet among the mountains of rubbish in a backyard recycling facility on China. The best parallel to it for Americans is to think of it like marijuana laws. , resulting in mounting plastic packaging. 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. In connection with this, the film represents a reflection on the legal status and living conditions of Chinas floating population (liudong renkou). Much like The Swan, a show that ran concurrently . Despite this, plastic waste continues to soar partly due to the relatively low cost of plastic bags shoppers are therefore not deterred to pay for one and the rapid rise of e-commerce, and delivery services, resulting in mounting plastic packaging. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and . Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. He was able to fly to the U.S. after weeks of tense negotiation. The success of the first film got Wang invited to California, where he toured recycling plants as part of his next round of research. Global plastic waste generation by country. He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. Among contributing factors was Plastic China (suliao wangguo, 2016), a documentary directed by Wang Jiuliang. Updated. 0000001806 00000 n It forces us to re-examine our waste habits and confront the reality that every time we throw out our beloved Tim Hortons coffee cups, we are poisoning our environment at an alarming rate. "These effects will be felt in the generation ahead. Trailer for 'Plastic China' film by director Wang Jiuliang. 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. Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. The Yangtze river, the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world, is an important water body in China. 0000001315 00000 n "There is no point in controlling them. It was announced in late 2015 that the program was to end in early 2016. Now, the countrys import ban has pushed some developed countries to find ways to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. 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. 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. The film also resonated with the study of Chinas so-called informal recycling world that I conducted in the mid-2010s (Schulz 2018). This film debuted two years ago, but its relevance is striking in the wake of Chinas sudden refusal to continue importing foreign waste. , where in 2019, it reportedly churned out about 5.3 million tonnes of plastics. In the last two years, the issue of waste exports to China has attractedconsiderable mediaand public attention. 0000003242 00000 n No one can afford that," she complains. 0000009053 00000 n Plastic films, plastic bags, the plastic wrapping that comes around a lot of packaged goods, that all goes into the garbage. Garbage collectors called rag and bone men ply the alleys of the cities, pedaling . For years, even social scientists have supported a widely held belief that Chinese . 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. 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 . 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. Single-use plastics are also made almost entirely from fossil fuels. Jan. 1 marked a significant cultural shift in China starting this year, families will be able to have two children. Some scenes in the film take place in a dumpsite, where waste is burned in the open, or next to a river, where it accumulates. Yet, something in Plastic China must have bothered Chinese censors, and prompted them to intervene. Her body was giving her all the telltale signs that she was pregnant again. The daughter of a young plastic factory worker, Yi Jie, looks over a heap of plastic while cradling her baby sibling. But Chinas contribution to the global plastic crisis does not end there. Thats the main source of outward tension in the film, though the squalor in which they all live is a painful commentary on the costs of rapid growth in such a stratified country. Among the films many harrowing scenes is that of Pengs wife giving birth to her fourth child in the Wangs garden, with what looks like a total absence of medical assistance. In sum, China's exercise of power has been more hard than soft. 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 . ", 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. China used to take much of it, but has banned imports of plastic waste so where does it now go? 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. It has been ten months since China closed its doors to the world's recycling waste. "If you carry it with you all the time, it gets too tiring.". 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. The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children. 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. Yeah, in China you'll meet tons of people who had siblings born while the one-child policy was in effect. Kate Sheehy. He lived in comfort and was treated preferentially by the Wei court. 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. 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). "This was not your average level of policy enforcement. . 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. Some businesses have stepped up, too. what happened to the families in plastic china. 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. A deliberate shift in consumption will not happen overnight. In China, plastic pollution is starkly evident . 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. Get focused newsletters especially designed to be concise and easy to digest. Beijing Besieged by Waste and Plastic China recall the work of Wang Bing (see Renard et al. 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 . {&L Q4t)o('aJ. one-child policy, official program initiated in the late 1970s and early '80s by the central government of China, the purpose of which was to limit the great majority of family units in the country to one child each. 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. 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. Welcome to Wang Jiuliang's Plastic China, a quiet, intimate look into the lives of two Chinese families barely scraping a living by laboring at a small family run recycling plant. Her worries these days are more mundane. In the U.S. alone, some 26.7 million tons were sent out of the country between 1988 and. !(^^\(c-RUFkEE After 25 years as the world's salvage king, China refused to buy any recycled plastic scrap that wasn't 99.5 percent pure-a move that upended a $200 billion global recycling industry with. Alex Wong/Getty Images 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. 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. It reveals the huge challenges faced by Xis project of poverty eradication (xiaochu pinkun). 0000021210 00000 n A Chinese couple whose son was abducted in a hotel in 1988 have been reunited with him after 32 years. The insane volume of sorted scraps are pushed through a machine that turns the plastic into a gross, grey sludge before it is transformed into small grey pellets. But starting in 2005, the authorities began enforcing the policy with a renewed ferocity in Linyi. 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.