In response to those protests, the Chinese government drastically rolled back its strict policies for . 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. How China's plastic waste ban forced a global recycling reckoning. 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. Answer (1 of 7): Hi, from the grandchild of 3 families that would probably be considered bourgeois before 49 Family 1: Paternal Grandfather family, granted this was a quirky case as he was the son of a landlord (the most dominant family in that village for sure. 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. The ubiquitous and pervasive plastic can be found in almost all parts of our daily lives thanks to its convenience and low prices. 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. It was featured in numerous festivals outside China, and has won several awards. Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the China Centre, University of Oxford. One ton of unsorted waste was sold to China for about $9. In this sense, Plastic China has arguably played a key role in the recent evolution of the trade in recyclable waste. ", A mother and a grandmother take care of a child in Beijing on Jan. 1, 2016. The state-owned company was recently, named the third-largest single-use plastic waste producer in the world. There are over 5,000 little unregulated recycling plants in the town alone, giving Wang plenty of subject options. As research on plastic and its detriments on the environment increasingly pop up on our news feeds, its obvious that weve reached a breaking point. The terror of such enforcement of birth limits was widespread in Linyi, even if residents were not themselves planning on giving birth. In this rugged hardpan of north China known for poverty and coal, Zhang Yi had but two frail daughters to help scratch out a living. The LEGO Foundation is awarding a total of DKK 900 million (approximately US$ 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. 0000001204 00000 n The daughter of a young plastic factory worker, Yi Jie, looks over a heap of plastic while cradling her baby sibling. Initially Feng. Not only does the country consume, at least one fifth of the worlds plastics. For decades, China has relied on superficial policies targeting plastic to reduce waste in the country. 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. 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). One night, family planning officials approached her husband, intending to pressure him and his wife into ending the pregnancy. He used a pickax to drive them off and was imprisoned for that for half a year. 0000003242 00000 n 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. 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. 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. 03:15. In the film, Peng Wenyuanwho comes from Sichuan province, belongs to the Yi ethnic group, and is almost illiteratecomplains repeatedly about his salary. What was she hiding from? 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. When combined, the plastic pollution situation in China may seem bleak, raising fears of its monumental and possibly irreversible environmental damage and degradation. Climate. This is regrettable, for two main reasons. This is on top of the fact that Chinas population is growing by 0.5% on average annually. LINYI, China Outside, rain falls. 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. He came to the throne in 1908 at two-years-old and ruled until February 1912, when he was forced to abdicate. Image by: Our World in Data. 0000439869 00000 n "There was also rapid urbanization, economic growth, industrialization, female emancipation and more female labor force participation. You need an active subscription to post a comment. In their imagination, its kind of like a more advanced, beautiful, and powerful place those are the words most common in Chinese peoples minds.. We all must initiate a seismic cultural shift that sees a serious slowing down of our relentless consumerism. Despite censorship, Wang Jiuliang has managed to reach a wide audience with Plastic China, and have considerable impact. 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. 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. It is imperative that we completely eliminate unnecessary plastics, and that can only be achieved by radically changing our habits and becoming conscious of the environment with everything we do and everything we buy. Editor's note: This story contains descriptions that may be disturbing. 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. ", 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. 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. That's up from 152 million ten years. 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? For some, the pain is still too much to bear. Her worries these days are more mundane. Plastic films, plastic bags, the plastic wrapping that comes around a lot of packaged goods, that all goes into the garbage. Ng Han Guan/AP Some of them were located in rural recycling hubs, but many were not. "The one-child policy was not the only thing that happened in China in the 1980s and 1990s," Gietel-Basten says. 0000023031 00000 n Election. Kate Sheehy. 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. Jan. 1 marked a significant cultural shift in China starting this year, families will be able to have two children. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. NPR isn't using her name to protect her identity because of the trauma she suffered. China is also by far the largest source of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution. No full, official . Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. 0000035823 00000 n When his wife became pregnant again, he hoped for a son,. Medical staff massage babies at an infant care center in Yongquan, in Chongqing municipality, in southwest China, on Dec. 15, 2016. 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. Wang is a recognised authority on the topic of waste in China. Bright-eyed children run between heaping piles of plastic, a worn-out worker spends his meager wages on alcohol, and a preteen girl gazes solemnly at Western product advertisements she picks out of the monstrous piles of trash around her home. Han Dynasty Emperor Xian of Han, the last emperor of Han dynasty died as a duke. 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. hide caption. 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. 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. Written on 17 January 2019. 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. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. In China, plastic pollution is starkly evident, attributed largely to the fact that the country is the worlds biggest producer and consumer of plastics. Plastic China: Directed by Jiuliang Wang. 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). 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. All together, these measures are aligned with the countrys 2060 carbon neutrality targets. The low grade plastics normally sent to China consisted of plastic bags, food labels, coffee cups and more- all products that are normally used once before being tossed away. 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. Now they are stepping away from a plastics lobbying . The policy permeates through Chinese society in other, sometimes unexpected ways. Even if I had to go to prison and endure beatings, in the end, these children were able to survive. 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. https%3A%2F%2Fearth.org%2Fchina-plastic-pollution%2F. The brother of China's last emperor who was pushed off the throne more than 100 years ago has died. 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. That was a period where China's growth started booming. , 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. On average, only about 17% of the plastic used in China is recycled in some shape or form. It followed reports in the Age last month that revealed thousands tonnes of soft. His mother watches him approvingly. Hand-picked stories once a fortnight. The U.S. used to send a lot of its plastic waste to China to get recycled. 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. 0000039672 00000 n In connection with this, the film represents a reflection on the legal status and living conditions of Chinas floating population (liudong renkou). 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. Following the accepted narrative about China, its citizens might be expected to worship sons and disdain daughters. This targeted Boosting helps us to reach wider audiences aiming to convince the unconvinced, to inform the uninformed, to enlighten the dogmatic. 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). The film premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in November 2016, and was shown at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. China has been taking US plastic waste for three decades. 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. 0000018669 00000 n One night in August 2008, the mother made a fateful decision. The Qing . 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. 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 also explains why Wang Kuns plastic recycling workshop, like many others, relies on manual labour and a couple of unsophisticated and antiquated machines. 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. ". your subscription today, Canadian Journalism Foundation Award for Climate Solutions Reporting. Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. 43 0 obj <> endobj xref 43 32 0000000016 00000 n 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. Immediately afterwards, he embarked on a new project. He frightens viewers with images of the relentless plastic flowing through the small factory, preying on our ability to empathize with these poverty-stricken laborers. Viewers learn that this has to do with her status as a migrant, her familys meagre earnings, and her fathers alcoholism. 0000003466 00000 n The emotional song became a personal anthem for Chynna the daughter of Michelle Phillips and John Phillips of the legendary '60s band the Mamas and the Papas, and wife of actor Billy Baldwin . However, it is also strongly implied that Yijies gender played a role in her parents decision to neglect her education. His mother watches him approvingly. He and his wife persevered and had three sons. 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. The country once imported nearly half of the planet's plastic recyclables. The smiles that break across their grubby faces belie a bleak existence for the families that scrape by sorting plastic waste. 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 . Ontario. In conclusion, Plastic China constitutes a broad reflexion on social problems and dilemmas in the post-socialist era. This brings us to the topic of censorship. 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. The man wants to remain unnamed because he believes he could be harassed again for speaking of that time. And in May, after a new census showed the birth rate had slowed, China raised the cap to three children. Until there is a. 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 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 means that people eating fish have also been consuming plastics. 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 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. 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. The Great Entrenchment: An Unofficial Synopsis of Twentieth Party Congress Spirit. 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). Through my interviews with self-made entrepreneurs who live in the countryside or have rural origins, I came to the conclusion that, as a rule, these people did not enjoy any support from state authorities for changing their methods or upgrading their facilities in order to cause less pollution, and better protect workers. The rationale for implementing the policy was to reduce the growth rate of China's enormous population. 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. 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. Part of the reason she demurred when first speaking to NPR was because of how dearly her family fought for his birth. 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. 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. 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. Her son is part of the last generation of children in China whose births were ruled illegal at the time. Parents were not penalized for having twins, at least not according to the letter of the law. 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. 0000002606 00000 n Much like The Swan, a show that ran concurrently . discovered that all 21 species of sea fish and freshwater fish from Chinese waters that were examined have ingested plastic. Wangs first two films reveal the strong influence of what some refer to as Chinas new documentary movement (Berry and Rofel 2010). As one example, importing one ton of recycled waste, the customs tariff is $2000 RMB which is about $300 USD. "People act in funny ways," she says. To subscribe to email alerts for each issue of the Journal, newly published books, and information about upcoming events, please provide your contact information below. Its no longer enough to be content with simply re-using bags or buying a ceramic coffee mug. You might also like: Chinas Refusal to Take Back Food Containers Exposes Hong Kongs Broken Plastic Waste Management System. 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. It was vicious," he says. 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. 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. 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. Environmental News, Data Analysis, Research & Policy Solutions. 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 . Chen had been persecuted and detained in China after his work advising villagers and speaking out official abuses under the one-child rule. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. 9 U4W6}-+c\y^xu^`88^iY :\`PrAiSvF5f19/L2Jh206X 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. There, he was picked up by supporters and driven to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. By donating us $100, $50 or subscribe to Boosting $10/month we can get this article and others in front of tens of thousands of specially targeted readers. Following Pen and his daughter Yi Jie, under the watchful eye of boss Kun, this film shows the lives of those harmed most by severe social inequality. There were virtually no incentives to comply with environmental and safety regulation, and local authorities made little effort to improve the sectorin large part because officials at the village or town level had a stake in rapid, unbridled economic growth. AFP via Getty Images The seventh child, a boy, Liu Zhuang drowned at the age of five, and his mother says she cries every. According to the report, his wife was forced to confess that before her marriage, she had spent 60,000 on plastic surgery in South Korea, and looked completely different to how she was born. Maybe we would care about the health of those living at the bottom of the social ladder if we were a part their lives for 90 minutes. On January 1, 2019, a ban on plastic straws in restaurants and other service businesses began in Washington, D.C. Read on for the reasons . Mao Yin was snatched aged two, while his father stopped to get him some water on the way home. of the plastic used in China is recycled in some shape or form. It all started with a mint julep on a hot summer day. 0000010125 00000 n It's margarine tubs, clamshells, deli containers. It now collects its community's plastic trash and turns it into fuel. Her dreams are daydreams, a way for her to escape the harsh reality she experiences on a daily basis. siQ6_{#WP(*K9-4GF(NTZ,GI2RV#PF"@(!9BI-$(E^D]ut(nK Jgu")( D)" "I thought this is it if I do not have this child, my body will not be able to have any more.". Beijing seems to be neither "biding its time" nor rising peacefully. 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 . 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. 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. "These effects will be felt in the generation ahead. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, two major sellers of plastic bottles, have made sweeping sustainability commitments. 2a cmAAASDMn,!T+FrHV`)sbg:\8B@}Np(D3uOGh1.\8}) n"%UtZ-)9Kn>{b^xFrn{g(dX J1( O. B!$H BBAZ[:]nu+n:utvw=vvw9}#AaH"\mAnirF~'U44`~4w~gqci)kJ Just like Beijing Besieged by Waste, the movie uncovers a gnarly scene beyond the cosmopolitan city. 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