Ontario. She carried her son to term while hiding in a relative's house. 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 . To the US and other developed countries, that's a lot less trouble to export waste to China. He was able to fly to the U.S. after weeks of tense negotiation. 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. How China's plastic waste ban forced a global recycling reckoning. 0000439946 00000 n The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children. Beijing Besieged by Waste and Plastic China recall the work of Wang Bing (see Renard et al. 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. 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. November 15, 2022. 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. It now collects its community's plastic trash and turns it into fuel. The daughter of a young plastic factory worker, Yi Jie, looks over a heap of plastic while cradling her baby sibling. ", A mother and a grandmother take care of a child in Beijing on Jan. 1, 2016. But the legacy of the one-child rule is still painfully felt by many parents who suffered for having multiple children. 0000439869 00000 n $25,000 by April 5. of the plastic used in China is recycled in some shape or form. Among contributing factors was Plastic China (suliao wangguo, 2016), a documentary directed by Wang Jiuliang. First, this narrow focus fails to do justice to the richness and complexity of Wangs second, cinema version of Plastic China, whichunlike the first version targeting the pressconstitutes a broad social commentary and critique. Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. In one interview about the film, Wang stated that: China is a country that is facelifted, concealed, faked and unnatural. "Other doctors would artificially induce labor. She babysits, cooks, works and teaches her three younger siblings while her parents do the same back-breaking work day in and day out. 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. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, two major sellers of plastic bottles, have made sweeping sustainability commitments. Until there is a. 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. "I really feel happy. The film has been particularly closely associated with the issue of waste imports since July 2017, when the Chinese central government hit headlines domestically and internationally by announcing a ban on imports of 24 categories of waste, including many types of plastics (Voice of America 2018). In the film, Peng Wenyuanwho comes from Sichuan province, belongs to the Yi ethnic group, and is almost illiteratecomplains repeatedly about his salary. !(^^\(c-RUFkEE In connection with this, the film represents a reflection on the legal status and living conditions of Chinas floating population (liudong renkou). But the country is not ignorant of its environmental impacts, and has moved to take more aggressive strides to combat this exponentially growing problem. 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. "There was also rapid urbanization, economic growth, industrialization, female emancipation and more female labor force participation. 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. "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 . Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and . This alters the one-child policy that was introduced in 1978 to control the . Today, the ongoing secrecy and censorship makes it impossible to know how many died that night. Along the belt, human workers pick and channel what is valuable (bottles, cardboard, aluminium cans) into sorting chutes. 0000010125 00000 n Her dreams are daydreams, a way for her to escape the harsh reality she experiences on a daily basis. All the issues mentioned above are central to Wangs narrative in Plastic China. "Officials would kidnap you if you tried to have two children. A further issue highlighted in the film is that of conspicuous consumption. Her body was giving her all the telltale signs that she was pregnant again. But last year, China put the kibosh on . 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. 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. 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. China is also by far the largest source of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution. 0000010492 00000 n He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's one-child policy. Dr. Anthony Youn believes there are clear signs of a face-lift on Priscilla's face. 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. 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. But Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, cautions there is no definitive answer. 0000019453 00000 n Directors Jiu-liang Wang Genres Documentary Subtitles English [CC] Part of the reason she demurred when first speaking to NPR was because of how dearly her family fought for his birth. By the container load, the cast-off plastic comes from Korea, Europe and the US. 0000009053 00000 n The Qing . His research explores Chinas state project of ecological modernisation from the angle of e-waste reuse and recycling. How much waste does China produce? 04:22. 0000001315 00000 n She demurs, her voice growing quiet. 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. His mother watches him approvingly. When combined, the plastic pollution situation in China may seem bleak, raising fears of its monumental and possibly irreversible environmental damage and degradation. He asks Wang Kun, his boss and the owner of the recycling workshop the Pengs work in, for a raise. In the film, the main character, a bright girl named Peng Yijie, does not attend school, although she is already 11 years old. 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). hb```"qVta1 FsD 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. 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. 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. 43 0 obj <> endobj xref 43 32 0000000016 00000 n The people who had a stake in it did not welcome the shooting.. Officials in her village were actively policing families under the one-child policy. They must be in middle school or high school by now.". 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. According to the census conducted last year, the population is aging and there are fewer young children and working-age people, a major demographic shift that comes with its own economic strains. Chinese parents, who have children born outside the country's one-child policy, protest outside the family planning commission in an attempt to have their fines canceled in Beijing, on Jan. 5, 2016. 0000001943 00000 n Image by: Our World in Data. Eight to 14 million tons of plastic waste ends up in oceans every single year, causing great harm to marine life, from accidental ingestion and entanglement, to increasing the risk of invasive species, which can throw entire ecosystems off balance. This means that people eating fish have also been consuming plastics. 0000003466 00000 n 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. 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. 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. "The one-child policy was not the only thing that happened in China in the 1980s and 1990s," Gietel-Basten says. It forces us to re-examine our waste habits and confront the reality that every time we throw out our beloved Tim Hortons coffee cups, we are poisoning our environment at an alarming rate. Image from 'Plastic China' documentary website. "That requires buying them a car, an apartment. Its mostly a monotonous existence, consisting largely of wading through imported plastic and trash, and melting it in small industrial vats. It has been slow to completely dismantle its massive family planning bureaucracy built up over the past four decades. 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 China, plastic pollution is starkly evident . of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution. In other words, though it looks good exteriorly, it has a lot of interior problems (Kanthor 2017). Some demographers in China argue that instituting birth limits was necessary for keeping birth rates low. 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. Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. 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. 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. Such a context makes it very risky for the latter to adopt a long-term perspective and invest in new equipment or techniques. The global plastic pollution crisis continues to worsen every year. 0000021210 00000 n 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. Kate Sheehy. The British colony simply. 0000022087 00000 n 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. Plastic China: Directed by Jiuliang Wang. "It has been so many years, and I have let the pain go," the mother of three says, eyes downcast. Katherine Martinko is a writer and expert in sustainable living. For years, even social scientists have supported a widely held belief that Chinese . This is regrettable, for two main reasons. The Pengs precarious existence and the fact that they are basically left to fend for themselves is striking for both Chinese and foreign viewers. You might also like: Chinas Refusal to Take Back Food Containers Exposes Hong Kongs Broken Plastic Waste Management System. 0000035786 00000 n 0000023972 00000 n Thus, in a way, Wang departs from the perspective of environmental dumping. Beijing seems to be neither "biding its time" nor rising peacefully. It was vicious," he says. When the inevitable collapse came, most of the companies went bankrupt, leaving city authorities having to pay to clean up the mess. No one can afford that," she complains. 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. 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. He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the China Centre, University of Oxford. In this sense, Plastic China has arguably played a key role in the recent evolution of the trade in recyclable 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. Either the government is already losing faith in the reality of its implementation, or it needs a bigger budget for advertising. 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