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. China implemented the policy of limiting each family to one child in 1979 to slow the growth of the country's population. HdU{PSW? Among contributing factors was Plastic China (suliao wangguo, 2016), a documentary directed by Wang Jiuliang. These economic penalties depleted his life savings, a financial impact that compounded over the ensuing years. 0000017207 00000 n It has been ten months since China closed its doors to the world's recycling waste. Chen, the lawyer, mounted a class action lawsuit on behalf of Linyi's women. China has been taking US plastic waste for three decades. They must be in middle school or high school by now.". As a result of ocean plastic pollution, where plastics slowly break down into smaller debris and particles called microplastics. "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. New York CNN Business . He used a pickax to drive them off and was imprisoned for that for half a year. The U.S., Japan and Germany are all at the top of the list when it comes to exporting their used plastic. The Yangtze river, the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world, is an important water body in China. It was followed very selectively. 0000010492 00000 n The daughter of a young plastic factory worker, Yi Jie, looks over a heap of plastic while cradling her baby sibling. 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. 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. 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. How China's plastic waste ban forced a global recycling reckoning. Puren was the youngest brother of the final Qing monarch Puyi, who ruled for four years until 1912. Her worries these days are more mundane. The documentary is also a meditation on issues of gender inequality. Some of them were located in rural recycling hubs, but many were not. Work done by environmentalists Chen Liwen and Mao Da from China Zero Waste Alliance (ling feiqi lianmeng) suggests that waste management is either lacking or highly inefficient in the Chinese countryside as a whole, and that much remains to be done in this field (Chitwood 2018). 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. 2a cmAAASDMn,!T+FrHV`)sbg:\8B@}Np(D3uOGh1.\8}) n"%UtZ-)9Kn>{b^xFrn{g(dX J1( O. "There is no use in trying to make sense of society. 0000002606 00000 n A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste. "This was not your average level of policy enforcement. Thus, in a way, Wang departs from the perspective of environmental dumping. She wants to start preparing for her son's marriage a costly endeavor as rural families expect the husband to provide a material guarantee for any future wife. Additionally, China currently tops the list of biggest greenhouse gas emitters though the US overtakes it for emissions per capita. The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children. Directors Jiu-liang Wang Genres Documentary Subtitles English [CC] 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. B!$H BBAZ[:]nu+n:utvw=vvw9}#AaH"\mAnirF~'U44`~4w~gqci)kJ Meanwhile, mass urbanization and rural migration have changed the financial and social calculus, making . In the film, the main character, a bright girl named Peng Yijie, does not attend school, although she is already 11 years old. 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. 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. Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. And in May, after a new census showed the birth rate had slowed, China raised the cap to three children. Anxious about already strained public education and health care systems, China's leadership is reportedly considering ditching limits entirely. 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 . Today, he lives in Maryland with his family. 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 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. 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. This also explains why Wang Kuns plastic recycling workshop, like many others, relies on manual labour and a couple of unsophisticated and antiquated machines. The man wants to remain unnamed because he believes he could be harassed again for speaking of that time. What could the family planning officials have done to her? Now the world is scrambling to adjust. No one can afford that," she complains. 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). 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. 0000001943 00000 n Following the accepted narrative about China, its citizens might be expected to worship sons and disdain daughters. For years, even social scientists have supported a widely held belief that Chinese . All together, these measures are aligned with the countrys 2060 carbon neutrality targets. 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). Because many prioritized having a son over a daughter, orphanages experienced a surge in baby girls who were abandoned or put up for adoption. 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. 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. Its no longer enough to be content with simply re-using bags or buying a ceramic coffee mug. $2599 ($0.87/Count) Save more with Subscribe & Save. The film clearly belongs to Chinas new documentary movement, which has created an important space for social commentary and critique since the early 1990s (Berry and Rofel 2010). She babysits, cooks, works and teaches her three younger siblings while her parents do the same back-breaking work day in and day out. 0000019453 00000 n 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. On average, only about 17% of the plastic used in China is recycled in some shape or form. 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. 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. In August 2014, the little girl was able to go to school and she is in third grade now. That's pushing policymakers to consider raising the official retirement age currently 60 for men and 55 for women for the first time in 40 years. ", A mother and a grandmother take care of a child in Beijing on Jan. 1, 2016. Initially Feng. 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. Ontario. 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. Even if I had to go to prison and endure beatings, in the end, these children were able to survive. This means that people eating fish have also been consuming plastics. Yvan Schulz obtained his PhD from the Anthropology Institute, University of Neuchtel in February 2018. Some demographers in China argue that instituting birth limits was necessary for keeping birth rates low. 0000035823 00000 n 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. . 0000439946 00000 n It is important to stress that, while these features of Chinas contemporary condition can be observed in rural recycling hubs, they are not unique to these places. what happened to the families in plastic china. 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. But Chinas contribution to the global plastic crisis does not end there. There is something profoundly disturbing in the Wangs purchase of a shiny new sedan car. 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. Part of the reason she demurred when first speaking to NPR was because of how dearly her family fought for his birth. 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 . For some, the pain is still too much to bear. One night, family planning officials approached her husband, intending to pressure him and his wife into ending the pregnancy. No full, official . 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. 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 . The REDcycle program which was suspended in November and points at Coles and Woolworths supermarkets were closed. When the ancestral temples were destroyed most families lost the records of their extended family. 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. She carried her son to term while hiding in a relative's house. Updated. 0000020209 00000 n With almost a spooky resemblance to Wildenstein, the Bogdanoff brothers - like her - are still injecting and filling into their seventies. Twenty years later, the volume of. 0000018669 00000 n In the film, Peng Wenyuanwho comes from Sichuan province, belongs to the Yi ethnic group, and is almost illiteratecomplains repeatedly about his salary. Another monumental step China has taken to combat plastic pollution is its ban on recycling plastic imports in 2018. 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. China boosts electric car fleet for public transport, Support award-winning independent journalism with Her dreams are daydreams, a way for her to escape the harsh reality she experiences on a daily basis. 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. 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. 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. Posted in Article, Work of Arts. 43 0 obj <> endobj xref 43 32 0000000016 00000 n Dr. Steven Svehlak and Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Payman Simoni agree. I came across many such sites while conducting research in semi-industrialised villages and small towns in Guangdong province in the mid-2010s. 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. hide caption. 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). The young girl would love to visit the United States, but shed settle for going to school something her father, Peng, an alcoholic who works for the plant manager, has no interest in making happen. That part of the industry is very sensitive, and if you have nothing to do with them, you cant get in, Wang said. "If you carry it with you all the time, it gets too tiring.". Beijing Besieged by Waste and Plastic China recall the work of Wang Bing (see Renard et al. 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. , where in 2019, it reportedly churned out about 5.3 million tonnes of plastics. Much of the Western worlds waste was once bound for China. to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. one of the fairly recent ancesto. "It has been so many years, and I have let the pain go," the mother of three says, eyes downcast. That was a period where China's growth started booming. Katherine Martinko is a writer and expert in sustainable living. Climate. Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. Yet, towards the end of the film, the Wangs spend their entire savingsand even borrow moneyto purchase a vehicle for which they seem to have little practical need. Enforcement of the policy had begun to loosen by the early 2000s, as horrific stories of forced abortions and botched sterilizations caused policymakers to rethink the rule. 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). It has been slow to completely dismantle its massive family planning bureaucracy built up over the past four decades. Either the government is already losing faith in the reality of its implementation, or it needs a bigger budget for advertising. 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. 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). During that time, imperial China was replaced by the Republic of China. In the U.S. alone, some 26.7 million tons were sent out of the country between 1988 and. 0000035786 00000 n 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. November 15, 2022. {&L Q4t)o('aJ. "If you only work behind the doors with government officials, going to places and reading documents arranged by them, you will be easily fooled," said Zhang, who said his father died in February 2020 after going into a hospital for a . 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 U.S. used to send a lot of its plastic waste to China to get recycled. The . "All we can do is go on living," she says. The seventh child, a boy, Liu Zhuang drowned at the age of five, and his mother says she cries every. But even there Johnson found numerous stories of families going to great lengths . Andy Wong/AP NPR isn't using her name to protect her identity because of the trauma she suffered. 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. First of all his film tackles the problem of labour exploitation. This brings us to the topic of censorship. 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. But Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, cautions there is no definitive answer. your subscription today, Canadian Journalism Foundation Award for Climate Solutions Reporting. Plastic China (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ) is a 2016 Chinese documentary film depicting the lives of two families who make their living recycling plastic waste imported from developed countries. The family, who lives near the city of Kunming in Yunnan province, adopted what . "Women have it all figured out now they won't have more kids even when they're told to have more!" 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. China is also by far the largest source of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution. Global mismanaged waste in total. The British colony simply. 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. 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. The new documentary 'Plastic China' plunges into the dirty side of recycling. 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. Midway through its annual session, China's ceremonial parliament is focusing on boosting the economy, building self-reliance in technology and further squeezing room for political opposition in Hong Kong. In other words, though it looks good exteriorly, it has a lot of interior problems (Kanthor 2017). He came to the throne in 1908 at two-years-old and ruled until February 1912, when he was forced to abdicate. 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. 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. Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images 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. China had 1 million more births in 2016 than in 2015, following the end of the one-child policy. Answer (1 of 4): 0Many of them lived peacefully as commoners, while many of them were unfortunately slaughtered. Trailer for 'Plastic China' film by director Wang Jiuliang. 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. Based on current rates, the countrys total population could reach up to 1.46 billion by 2028, resulting in even high amounts of waste. Plastic China: Directed by Jiuliang Wang. "The policy was wrong and what we did with Chen was right," says a neighbor of Chen, the lawyer who sued the city of Linyi. 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. Garbage collectors called rag and bone men ply the alleys of the cities, pedaling . 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. Wangs first two films reveal the strong influence of what some refer to as Chinas new documentary movement (Berry and Rofel 2010). Kate Sheehy. His mother watches him approvingly. 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). Some businesses have stepped up, too. 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. Director Wang Jiuliang subscription today, Canadian Journalism Foundation Award for Climate Solutions Reporting family fought for birth! 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