It was vicious," he says. That was a period where China's growth started booming. 0000001204 00000 n As a result of ocean plastic pollution, where plastics slowly break down into smaller debris and particles called microplastics. 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. 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. Global plastic waste generation by country. Instead of numbing us with facts like how China has contaminated over 80 per cent of its fresh water through landfills and processing, he gets us to feel bad for Kun, Peng and their kids; if we identified with their plight, perhaps we wouldnt want to send so much trash for them to sort through. siQ6_{#WP(*K9-4GF(NTZ,GI2RV#PF"@(!9BI-$(E^D]ut(nK Jgu")( D)" It was shipping goods to Europe and the States and that enabled a cheap process of shipping the scrap back to China in the holds of the. Garbage collectors called rag and bone men ply the alleys of the cities, pedaling . The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children. 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. Its massive local plastic production further contributes to Chinas lion share of global greenhouse emissions mainly from coal production. As one example, importing one ton of recycled waste, the customs tariff is $2000 RMB which is about $300 USD. It has been slow to completely dismantle its massive family planning bureaucracy built up over the past four decades. 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. 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. A familiar margarine packet among the mountains of rubbish in a backyard recycling facility on China. China is also by far the. From Jun 1 of that year, customers began to be charged for plastic shopping bags, and a total ban of ultrathin (less than 0.025mm thick) bags came into action. On average, only about. Today, he lives in Maryland with his family. The film also alerted people in China to the dangers of haphazard waste management, and drew attention to the sheer mass of waste generated by a city the size of Beijing. 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). 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. She demurs, her voice growing quiet. Ran Zheng for NPR Yet the authorities still only allow couples to have three children. 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 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. And I was carrying a camera, so it was especially tough at the beginning. This doesn't bode well for our plastic waste problem. 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. Viewers learn that this has to do with her status as a migrant, her familys meagre earnings, and her fathers alcoholism. The film premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in November 2016, and was shown at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Now the world is scrambling to adjust. The . 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 . While more time is needed to analyse the bans impacts domestically, it has had rippling effects across global plastic pollution and management. "I thought this is it if I do not have this child, my body will not be able to have any more.". She builds forts inside the recyclables and rifles through Western magazines, piecing together clues about life beyond the garbage and enriching it with fantasies. He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's one-child policy. So the mother went into hiding to carry her son to term. Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. trailer <<4243014C4E284DEB98C83941C307E81B>]/Prev 529831>> startxref 0 %%EOF 74 0 obj <>stream 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. 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. Until there is a. %PDF-1.4 % In sum, China's exercise of power has been more hard than soft. Ng Han Guan/AP 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. 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. China boosts electric car fleet for public transport, Support award-winning independent journalism with Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's. ! Wang recalled. Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. Single-use plastics are also made almost entirely from fossil fuels. "Women have it all figured out now they won't have more kids even when they're told to have more!" 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). 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. Today, the ongoing secrecy and censorship makes it impossible to know how many died that night. 0000024672 00000 n No one can afford that," she complains. 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. 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. The policy permeates through Chinese society in other, sometimes unexpected ways. (Liu 2014). 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. State media celebrated the news. But Chinas contribution to the global plastic crisis does not end there. 0000439869 00000 n But Kunwho is Han, from Shandong province, and can read and writerefuses, telling Wenyuan that he can always leave if he is not satisfied. 0000020209 00000 n 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. He came to the throne in 1908 at two-years-old and ruled until February 1912, when he was forced to abdicate. Dr. Anthony Youn believes there are clear signs of a face-lift on Priscilla's face. Andy Wong/AP Twenty years later, the volume of. But starting in 2005, the authorities began enforcing the policy with a renewed ferocity in Linyi. This film debuted two years ago, but its relevance is striking in the wake of Chinas sudden refusal to continue importing foreign waste. No full, official . 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. Trailer for 'Plastic China' film by director Wang Jiuliang. 0000019453 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. At some point, Wang Kun pushes for Yijie to attend a local kindergarten, even offering to cover the costs, yet Yijies father, Peng Wenyuan, refuses, preferring that she continue to sort plastics, do household chores, and take care of her younger siblings. 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. Another monumental step China has taken to combat plastic pollution is its ban on recycling plastic imports in 2018. 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. The news hit hard in the United States, which is home to about 60,000 children adopted from China, mostly girls. 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. He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the China Centre, University of Oxford. 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 . What could the family planning officials have done to her? 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? 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. Much like The Swan, a show that ran concurrently . "It has been so many years, and I have let the pain go," the mother of three says, eyes downcast. 03:15. 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. They take her elsewhere, to a place where she can picture a better life, andmost damning of allit looks like this could be abroad. Even if I had to go to prison and endure beatings, in the end, these children were able to survive. 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. hide caption. Chen had been persecuted and detained in China after his work advising villagers and speaking out official abuses under the one-child rule. It all started with a mint julep on a hot summer day. 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. If you were hiding and they could not find you, they would kidnap your elder relatives and make them stand in cold water, in the winter," remembers Lu Bilun, a resident. Much of the Western worlds waste was once bound for China. Then in 2016, the state allowed two children. "There is no point in controlling them. 0000023972 00000 n We promise, no spam! 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 . This change will not be easy, but it must be done. Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. All the issues mentioned above are central to Wangs narrative in Plastic China. Medical staff massage babies at an infant care center in Yongquan, in Chongqing municipality, in southwest China, on Dec. 15, 2016. The limit in most cases was just one child. HdU{PSW? Her son is part of the last generation of children in China whose births were ruled illegal at the time. Plastic films, plastic bags, the plastic wrapping that comes around a lot of packaged goods, that all goes into the garbage. 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