Now the world is scrambling to adjust. 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. For years, even social scientists have supported a widely held belief that Chinese . 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. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. With almost a spooky resemblance to Wildenstein, the Bogdanoff brothers - like her - are still injecting and filling into their seventies. The global plastic pollution crisis continues to worsen every year. She is especially protective of him. 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 seventh child, a boy, Liu Zhuang drowned at the age of five, and his mother says she cries every. "I really feel happy. China has been taking US plastic waste for three decades. 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. What happened to the little girl in plastic China? Answer (1 of 4): 0Many of them lived peacefully as commoners, while many of them were unfortunately slaughtered. If anything, there is considerable overlap between Wangs film and the foreign waste rhetoric that accompanies state authorities action in the field of transboundary movements of waste since the early 2010s, and predates the ban announced in July 2017. 0000439946 00000 n That was a period where China's growth started booming. Along the belt, human workers pick and channel what is valuable (bottles, cardboard, aluminium cans) into sorting chutes. The smiles that break across their grubby faces belie a bleak existence for the families that scrape by sorting plastic waste. Andy Wong/AP "Despite all the overwhelming demographic evidence, they're saying, 'We need to control you,'" says the author, Fong. What is the current state of plastic pollution in China and how does the country deal with it? 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. That's up from 152 million ten years. hide caption. 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). 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. 04:22. Puren was the youngest brother of the final Qing monarch Puyi, who ruled for four years until 1912. Ontario. {&L Q4t)o('aJ. 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. 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. 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. , 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 promise, no spam! Yet, something in Plastic China must have bothered Chinese censors, and prompted them to intervene. The rest was buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and . No one can afford that," she complains. Image by: Our World in Data. 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. Get focused newsletters especially designed to be concise and easy to digest. hide caption. On Jan. 1, China enacted new legislation allowing all married couples to have two children. At that point, it was already the world's most populous country. A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste. There, he was picked up by supporters and driven to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. You need an active subscription to post a comment. 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. By the container load, the cast-off plastic comes from Korea, Europe and the US. 0000003242 00000 n There is one obvious, clear, imperative measure that we all must make a priority- we must reduce the amount of plastics we use every day. In August 2014, the little girl was able to go to school and she is in third grade now. 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 worries these days are more mundane. State media celebrated the news. "There is no point in controlling them. 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. One first reason why Plastic China should be considered as a comprehensive reflection on the contemporary condition in China is that this is consistent with the directors intention. 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. On average, only about. 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. Directors Jiu-liang Wang Genres Documentary Subtitles English [CC] Ran Zheng for NPR The prosperity of Chinas coastal regions relies on a massive inflow of migrant workers from the interior, who rarely have much bargaining power regarding their working conditions. 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. 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. . But even there Johnson found numerous stories of families going to great lengths . The main character is the employee's daughter, who never gets sent to school because she is helping her parents watch her younger siblings and sort through mountains of shredded plastic. Another factor that justifies adopting a broad interpretation of Plastic China is the wide range of social issues addressed by Wang. There is something profoundly disturbing in the Wangs purchase of a shiny new sedan car. In the film, the main character, a bright girl named Peng Yijie, does not attend school, although she is already 11 years old. Much of the Western worlds waste was once bound for China. Plastic China: Directed by Jiuliang Wang. It followed reports in the Age last month that revealed thousands tonnes of soft. 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 . This also explains why Wang Kuns plastic recycling workshop, like many others, relies on manual labour and a couple of unsophisticated and antiquated machines. 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. "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. 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. A familiar margarine packet among the mountains of rubbish in a backyard recycling facility on China. 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. And so, ironically, now that people are allowed to have more children, they are increasingly reluctant to, because of the high cost of child care and education. 0000024672 00000 n "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. 0000001204 00000 n The Qing . His mother watches him approvingly. Now, the countrys import ban has pushed some developed countries to find ways to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. Today, the world produces nearly 350 million tonnes of plastic waste, which is projected to double by 2040 if no action is taken. It was featured in numerous festivals outside China, and has won several awards. How China's plastic waste ban forced a global recycling reckoning. Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. Ten years after China's infant milk tragedy, parents still won't trust their babies to local formula . 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. That same year, he expressed his intention to undertake a follow-up project on waste imports beyond plastics, which he tentatively titled Dumping Ground of the World (shijie de laji chang) (Liu 2014). When asked about the dangers facing him, Wang just shrugged. Viewers learn that this has to do with her status as a migrant, her familys meagre earnings, and her fathers alcoholism. 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. 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. 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. China boosts electric car fleet for public transport, Support award-winning independent journalism with 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. 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. 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. The target . Whats more, about 91% of all plastic that has ever been made is not recycled, meaning that plastic which can take up to 500 years to decompose keeps accumulating and degrading our natural environments. For instance, Gurao, once Chinas largest bra manufacturing hub, struggles with waste-related pollution of comparable gravity to that of neighbouring Guiyu, the countrys infamous e-waste recycling capital. There are over 5,000 little unregulated recycling plants in the town alone, giving Wang plenty of subject options. Interestingly, it does not look further into waste imports, as Wang had originally planned, but instead addresses construction and real estates impact on the surface of the earth, in particular through mineral extraction and the desolate landscapes it produces in China (Wang 2016). 0000003466 00000 n 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. Chen had been persecuted and detained in China after his work advising villagers and speaking out official abuses under the one-child rule. 0000002606 00000 n She is especially protective of him. In China, the film went viral in January 2017 before quickly disappearing from the Internetthereby following a pattern that affects most of Wangs work (Zhao 2017). One ton of unsorted waste was sold to China for about $9. For decades, China has relied on superficial policies targeting plastic to reduce waste in the country. The terror of such enforcement of birth limits was widespread in Linyi, even if residents were not themselves planning on giving birth. ", 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. So the mother went into hiding to carry her son to term. This brings us to the topic of censorship. How much waste does China produce? The success of the first film got Wang invited to California, where he toured recycling plants as part of his next round of research. When combined, the plastic pollution situation in China may seem bleak, raising fears of its monumental and possibly irreversible environmental damage and degradation. "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. 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. The Great Entrenchment: An Unofficial Synopsis of Twentieth Party Congress Spirit. Lu says the harassment became so savage that elderly residents of Linyi became afraid to leave their homes out of fear they might be kidnapped. It was vicious," he says. First of all his film tackles the problem of labour exploitation. 0000018669 00000 n The . 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. Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. Mao's attempts to remove the family from the center of Chinese life ultimately failed, but not before destroying a few aspects of traditional culture. It has been ten months since China closed its doors to the world's recycling waste. In one interview about the film, Wang stated that: China is a country that is facelifted, concealed, faked and unnatural. what happened to the families in plastic china. A Chinese family has been forced to give up their pet dog after realizing they had actually adopted a black bear. 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. China is also by far the. Written on 17 January 2019. Priscilla Presley before and after (Source: Radar Online) Experts reckon that the 77-year-old has likely had cheek and lip fillers, skin resurfacing treatments, and a face-lift. Products. 0000035823 00000 n An Australian paper company called Pratt Industries built a paper mill in Ohio to take. 0000020209 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. Yvan Schulz obtained his PhD from the Anthropology Institute, University of Neuchtel in February 2018. Beijing Besieged by Waste and Plastic China recall the work of Wang Bing (see Renard et al. The family, who lives near the city of Kunming in Yunnan province, adopted what . Part of the reason she demurred when first speaking to NPR was because of how dearly her family fought for his birth. 03:15. Thus, in a way, Wang departs from the perspective of environmental dumping. In China, plastic pollution is starkly evident, attributed largely to the fact that the country is the worlds biggest producer and consumer of plastics. Much of the Western worlds waste was once bound for China. 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. Dr. Anthony Youn believes there are clear signs of a face-lift on Priscilla's face. 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. However, the films relevance extends far beyond the issue of waste management. 0000023972 00000 n Twenty-something Kun is a hard worker with a dream of buying a new car to boost his social status. This means that people eating fish have also been consuming plastics. 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. 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. NPR isn't using her name to protect her identity because of the trauma she suffered. During that time, imperial China was replaced by the Republic of China. His mother watches him approvingly. In the U.S. alone, some 26.7 million tons were sent out of the country between 1988 and. 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. Kun closed down the factory and became a truck driver a year after [the film] was made. 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. 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. China is also by far the largest source of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution. But Kunwho is Han, from Shandong province, and can read and writerefuses, telling Wenyuan that he can always leave if he is not satisfied. Made in China publications are open access and always available as a free download. It was featured in numerous festivals outside China, and has won several awards. Since 2014, Chinas household registration system (hukou) is being eased with a view to, among other things, give migrants better access to healthcare and education. But Peng has no money, and anyway, Yi-Jie has to take care of her younger siblings and contribute to the recycling work. 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 . Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. 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. Andy Wong/AP 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. The man wants to remain unnamed because he believes he could be harassed again for speaking of that time. 0000022087 00000 n All together, these measures are aligned with the countrys 2060 carbon neutrality targets. This is regrettable, for two main reasons. Alex Wong/Getty Images ", 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. Her body was giving her all the telltale signs that she was pregnant again. 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. Boost this article 0000001806 00000 n 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. Some demographers in China argue that instituting birth limits was necessary for keeping birth rates low. 0000023031 00000 n This targeted Boosting helps us to reach wider audiences aiming to convince the unconvinced, to inform the uninformed, to enlighten the dogmatic. Additionally, China currently tops the list of biggest greenhouse gas emitters though the US overtakes it for emissions per capita. He used a pickax to drive them off and was imprisoned for that for half a year. 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. 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. But starting in 2005, the authorities began enforcing the policy with a renewed ferocity in Linyi. Editor's note: This story contains descriptions that may be disturbing. Families were already having fewer children in the 1970s, before the policy took force in 1979. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, two major sellers of plastic bottles, have made sweeping sustainability commitments. 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. 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 . This alters the one-child policy that was introduced in 1978 to control the . 43 0 obj <> endobj xref 43 32 0000000016 00000 n your subscription today, Canadian Journalism Foundation Award for Climate Solutions Reporting. Either the government is already losing faith in the reality of its implementation, or it needs a bigger budget for advertising. This film debuted two years ago, but its relevance is striking in the wake of Chinas sudden refusal to continue importing foreign waste. In 2014, Wang released an early, less narrative but more explanatory version of his documentary addressed at the media, in which he clearly frames the issue as environmental dumping. 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. 0000010492 00000 n The Ocean Cleanup aims to remove 90 per cent of plastic waste from oceans The organisation has designed 600-metre-long plastic barriers designed to passively gather plastic as they float. The photographer-turned-director's debut documentary, 2011's Beijing Besieged by. 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. of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution. 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. While more time is needed to analyse the bans impacts domestically, it has had rippling effects across global plastic pollution and management. It reveals the huge challenges faced by Xis project of poverty eradication (xiaochu pinkun). The Pengs precarious existence and the fact that they are basically left to fend for themselves is striking for both Chinese and foreign viewers. 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. Based on current rates, the countrys total population could reach up to 1.46 billion by 2028, resulting in even high amounts of waste. Wang is a recognised authority on the topic of waste in China. 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. That part of the industry is very sensitive, and if you have nothing to do with them, you cant get in, Wang said. Jan. 1 marked a significant cultural shift in China starting this year, families will be able to have two children. The mother of one of these middle schoolers holds her son close. 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 . In March 2018, China's environment minister at the time, Li Ganjie, noted that China used to import around 4 to 4.5 million tons of solid, unrecyclable trash. He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the China Centre, University of Oxford. To worsen every year unsorted waste was once bound for China his work advising villagers and speaking out abuses! Film debuted two years ago, but its relevance is striking in U.S.! 1 of 4 ): 0Many of them were unfortunately slaughtered to give up their pet dog realizing... 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