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. , 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. , where in 2019, it reportedly churned out about 5.3 million tonnes of plastics. November 15, 2022. 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. Directors Jiu-liang Wang Genres Documentary Subtitles English [CC] Now, the countrys import ban has pushed some developed countries to find ways to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. 0000017207 00000 n A familiar margarine packet among the mountains of rubbish in a backyard recycling facility on China. There are clear signs that this space is shrinking nowadays, yet this does not stop many independent filmmakers from pursuing their mission (Berry 2017). When combined, the plastic pollution situation in China may seem bleak, raising fears of its monumental and possibly irreversible environmental damage and degradation. 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 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. 0000010492 00000 n 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. Election. Such a context makes it very risky for the latter to adopt a long-term perspective and invest in new equipment or techniques. It is against this backdrop that Plastic China came out in 2016. 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. 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. New York CNN Business . !(^^\(c-RUFkEE Not only does the country consume, at least one fifth of the worlds plastics. 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. Andy Wong/AP 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. The Qing . 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. 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. Plastic China: Directed by Jiuliang Wang. Products. "I really feel happy. To compensate for this narrow focus, we need to look beyond the predominant reading. 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. Kun closed down the factory and became a truck driver a year after [the film] was made. Image by: Our World in Data. Its river basin comprises one-fifth of the countrys land area, and supports and houses nearly one-third of the population. $25,000 by April 5. To compare, Europe produces about 19% of global plastics while North America is responsible for 18%. 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. 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. But Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, cautions there is no definitive answer. She is especially protective of him. 0000035786 00000 n Even if I had to go to prison and endure beatings, in the end, these children were able to survive. China's decision to abolish its one-child policy offered some relief to couples and to sellers of baby-related goods, but the government hasn't lifted birth limits entirely. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Plastic films, plastic bags, the plastic wrapping that comes around a lot of packaged goods, that all goes into the garbage. Without a fundamental cultural shift in our societys grievous over-use of plastic, we will see the same mountains of scraps growing in our pristine backyards just like Peng, Kun, and Yi Jie see everyday. 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. It was followed very selectively. 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. Even before China's ban, only 9 percent of discarded plastic was being recycled, while 12 percent was burned. 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. The family, who lives near the city of Kunming in Yunnan province, adopted what . 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. August 4, 2020 1:46pm. They dont know how the United States really is, because all they have received is information from Chinese TV, which is made by the Ministry of Media, Wang said. Where Wang achieves sentimentality and awareness at displaying his subjects somber existence, he fails in giving his audience any objective information about the health, social, or environmental impacts of the Chinese recycling process. But the legacy of the one-child rule is still painfully felt by many parents who suffered for having multiple children. It was vicious," he says. There are two younger boys, Liu Zhuang, 5 and Liu Jian, 4, as well as newly born twin sisters. But Kunwho is Han, from Shandong province, and can read and writerefuses, telling Wenyuan that he can always leave if he is not satisfied. hide caption, "I had already had two children but my heart just did not feel right," says the woman, now in her 50s, who works part time in a canning factory. By the container load, the cast-off plastic comes from Korea, Europe and the US. It's margarine tubs, clamshells, deli containers. 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 Kun and Peng in Plastic China. 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. Environmental News, Data Analysis, Research & Policy Solutions. 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. Trailer for 'Plastic China' film by director Wang Jiuliang. The smiles that break across their grubby faces belie a bleak existence for the families that scrape by sorting plastic waste. 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. "Despite all the overwhelming demographic evidence, they're saying, 'We need to control you,'" says the author, Fong. Giving birth to him was a huge risk and she took no chances. 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. 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). In China, plastic pollution is starkly evident . The suit led to an apology from the authorities in Linyi and a reduction in the kidnappings, beatings and forced abortions. The film also resonated with the study of Chinas so-called informal recycling world that I conducted in the mid-2010s (Schulz 2018). 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. 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. He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's. That was a period where China's growth started booming. She babysits, cooks, works and teaches her three younger siblings while her parents do the same back-breaking work day in and day out. 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. China boosts electric car fleet for public transport, Support award-winning independent journalism with 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 . Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. 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. With Plastic China, Wang aimed to raise awareness of his homelands role in the global waste trade, and expose its negative repercussions on the Chinese population and environment. That part of the industry is very sensitive, and if you have nothing to do with them, you cant get in, Wang said. All together, these measures are aligned with the countrys 2060 carbon neutrality targets. She already had two children and had gone through four abortions afterward, to avoid paying the ruinously high "social maintenance fee" demanded from families as penalty when they contravened birth limits. The country once imported nearly half of the planet's plastic recyclables. 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. The . This alters the one-child policy that was introduced in 1978 to control the . All the issues mentioned above are central to Wangs narrative in Plastic China. Global mismanaged waste in total. In this sense, Plastic China has arguably played a key role in the recent evolution of the trade in recyclable waste. A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste. Because many prioritized having a son over a daughter, orphanages experienced a surge in baby girls who were abandoned or put up for adoption. "Our main products are paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, mixed plastics . 0000023031 00000 n Parents were not penalized for having twins, at least not according to the letter of the law. 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