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"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. But the country is not ignorant of its environmental impacts, and has moved to take more aggressive strides to combat this exponentially growing problem. This means that people eating fish have also been consuming plastics. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. the mother laughs helplessly. They must be in middle school or high school by now.". 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. 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 has been ten months since China closed its doors to the world's recycling waste. What is the current state of plastic pollution in China and how does the country deal with it? Based on current rates, the countrys total population could reach up to 1.46 billion by 2028, resulting in even high amounts of waste. Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. 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. 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. What happened to the little girl in plastic China? Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, two major sellers of plastic bottles, have made sweeping sustainability commitments. China is also by far the. 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. Kate Sheehy. Two of the more tragic examples - who were born identical twins and appear to be twinning themselves with duelling plastic surgeries - are French TV stars Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff. The seventh child, a boy, Liu Zhuang drowned at the age of five, and his mother says she cries every. During that time, imperial China was replaced by the Republic of China. 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. 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. Some of them were located in rural recycling hubs, but many were not. 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. Alex Wong/Getty Images Now, the countrys import ban has pushed some developed countries to find ways to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. China had 1 million more births in 2016 than in 2015, following the end of the one-child policy. 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 . 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. Katherine Martinko is a writer and expert in sustainable living. You might also like: Solution for Plastic Pollution: 6 Policies and Innovations Tackling Plastics, Featured image by: Sheila/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). NPR isn't using her name to protect her identity because of the trauma she suffered. The daughter of a young plastic factory worker, Yi Jie, looks over a heap of plastic while cradling her baby sibling. Among contributing factors was Plastic China (suliao wangguo, 2016), a documentary directed by Wang Jiuliang. 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. 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. 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 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. There are clear signs that this space is shrinking nowadays, yet this does not stop many independent filmmakers from pursuing their mission (Berry 2017). 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. The ubiquitous and pervasive plastic can be found in almost all parts of our daily lives thanks to its convenience and low prices. No full, official . 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 Yangtze river, the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world, is an important water body in China. 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). 0000019453 00000 n hb```"qVta1 FsD 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. But Chinas contribution to the global plastic crisis does not end there. , resulting in mounting plastic packaging. He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's. A Chinese family has been forced to give up their pet dog after realizing they had actually adopted a black bear. Garbage collectors called rag and bone men ply the alleys of the cities, pedaling . Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. 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. Experts warn of an increase in illegal dumping and incineration of plastics as prices for plastic scraps plummet in the wake of Chinas exit from the market it dominated. Thus, in a way, Wang departs from the perspective of environmental dumping. Mao Yin was snatched aged two, while his father stopped to get him some water on the way home. The family, who lives near the city of Kunming in Yunnan province, adopted what . Why won't China remove all caps? It was featured in numerous festivals outside China, and has won several awards. A Chinese couple whose son was abducted in a hotel in 1988 have been reunited with him after 32 years. 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. The suit led to an apology from the authorities in Linyi and a reduction in the kidnappings, beatings and forced abortions. 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). 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. Ng Han Guan/AP Kun closed down the factory and became a truck driver a year after [the film] was made. This is obvious in, among others, his choice of topic (Chinas economic growth and opening to the world as experienced by the countrys underclass), his relationships with subjects (long-term involvement, much like that of an anthropologist), and his cinematographic style (observational realism involving on-the-spot and spontaneous shooting, a director who stands behind the camera, and the absence of voiceover). 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. 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. Yet, have linked the Yangtze river as the one of the biggest sources of global plastic pollution, claiming the river to be responsible for more than half of all marine plastic pollution, but more recent studies found that the, Philippines accounts for more than one-third. 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. We promise, no spam! what happened to the families in plastic china. Second, this prevents us from understanding why the film was censored in China, when the denunciation of waste imports actually fits with the Chinese states increasingly restrictive policies on this issue since the 2010s. hide caption. The plan also seeks to promote plastic alternatives such as bamboo, wood and paper (and scientific research into biodegradable plastics) over the next five years, as well as clearing plastic waste from key lakes and rivers, tourist attractions and rural areas. Wangs 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. 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. 43 0 obj <> endobj xref 43 32 0000000016 00000 n 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. 0000003791 00000 n 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 . 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. 0000024672 00000 n This change will not be easy, but it must be done. 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. By the container load, the cast-off plastic comes from Korea, Europe and the US. Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images Editor's note: This story contains descriptions that may be disturbing. 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. 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). "Other doctors would artificially induce labor. The aspect of the film that most stuck with me personally was how Plastic China depicted the poor standard of waste management in rural China. The . Part of the reason she demurred when first speaking to NPR was because of how dearly her family fought for his birth. https%3A%2F%2Fearth.org%2Fchina-plastic-pollution%2F. INVERSE 2023 BDG Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Officials in her village were actively policing families under the one-child policy. The film also resonated with the study of Chinas so-called informal recycling world that I conducted in the mid-2010s (Schulz 2018). 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. For decades, China has relied on superficial policies targeting plastic to reduce waste in the country. A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste. 0000016680 00000 n I came across many such sites while conducting research in semi-industrialised villages and small towns in Guangdong province in the mid-2010s. To compensate for this narrow focus, we need to look beyond the predominant reading. 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 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. Children ride a toy train at a shopping mall in Beijing, on Oct. 30, 2015. 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. Chen had been persecuted and detained in China after his work advising villagers and speaking out official abuses under the one-child rule. These economic penalties depleted his life savings, a financial impact that compounded over the ensuing years. Climate. With almost a spooky resemblance to Wildenstein, the Bogdanoff brothers - like her - are still injecting and filling into their seventies. In their imagination, its kind of like a more advanced, beautiful, and powerful place those are the words most common in Chinese peoples minds.. 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. What was she hiding from? Initially Feng. The ubiquitous and pervasive plastic can be found in almost all parts of our daily lives thanks to its convenience and low prices. 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. Now the world is scrambling to adjust. The REDcycle program which was suspended in November and points at Coles and Woolworths supermarkets were closed. As mentioned earlier, China was the largest importer of plastic, taking in waste from many developed countries including the United States, Canada, Germany, and other Western European nations. One ton of unsorted waste was sold to China for about $9. On average, only about 17% of the plastic used in China is recycled in some shape or form. It followed reports in the Age last month that revealed thousands tonnes of soft. 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. But some babies were alive when they were born and began crying. Ten years after China's infant milk tragedy, parents still won't trust their babies to local formula . In the 1990s, he says, family planning officials ambushed him in his home at night and beat him with sticks in an effort to convince his wife to abort their third son. Thats the main source of outward tension in the film, though the squalor in which they all live is a painful commentary on the costs of rapid growth in such a stratified country.
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