0000017854 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. 0000439869 00000 n In the cinema version of Plastic China, the concept of labour exploitation applies more clearly within China and even among former peasants than it does between China and the highly industrialised countries from which waste is imported. 0000016680 00000 n 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. There are two younger boys, Liu Zhuang, 5 and Liu Jian, 4, as well as newly born twin sisters. 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. Directors Jiu-liang Wang Genres Documentary Subtitles English [CC] Municipalities across Canada are struggling under the weight of the rapidly accumulating plastics with no plan in place to deal with them, and it will continue to worsen if we keep living the way we have been. 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. At some point, Wang Kun pushes for Yijie to attend a local kindergarten, even offering to cover the costs, yet Yijies father, Peng Wenyuan, refuses, preferring that she continue to sort plastics, do household chores, and take care of her younger siblings. "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. 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. Ng Han Guan/AP Katherine Martinko is a writer and expert in sustainable living. 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. 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. The suit led to an apology from the authorities in Linyi and a reduction in the kidnappings, beatings and forced abortions. 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. 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). 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 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. Part of the reason she demurred when first speaking to NPR was because of how dearly her family fought for his birth. 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. hide caption. India News | Latest India News | Read latest and breaking news from India. Election. 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. Based on current rates, the countrys total population could reach up to 1.46 billion by 2028, resulting in even high amounts of waste. Jan. 1 marked a significant cultural shift in China starting this year, families will be able to have two children. On Jan. 1, China enacted new legislation allowing all married couples to have two children. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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). Summaries. It followed reports in the Age last month that revealed thousands tonnes of soft. 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. ", 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. It has been ten months since China closed its doors to the world's recycling waste. 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. 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. 0000001781 00000 n 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. When probed about why he doesnt send his kids to school, his reply is that he prefers to spend money on drinking, musing that his children can attend school for free whenever they return to his home village. The British colony simply. 0000001204 00000 n 60 Pieces Disposable Plastic Plates Set, Premium Plates for Parties with Real China Design, Red Plates Set - 30 x10.25 Inch Dinner and 30 x7.5 Inch Salad Hard Plates Combo (Warm Red) 189. Garbage collectors called rag and bone men ply the alleys of the cities, pedaling . 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. Among contributing factors was Plastic China (suliao wangguo, 2016), a documentary directed by Wang Jiuliang. Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. ". 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. 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. 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. Initially Feng. Editor's note: This story contains descriptions that may be disturbing. An important implication is that improving the lives of the people who live in rural recycling hubs and engage in waste sorting and processing requires more than putting an end to waste importsespecially if imports are substituted with domestic waste, of which there is no shortage in China. 0000003791 00000 n But Chinas contribution to the global plastic crisis does not end there. 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 . Han Dynasty Emperor Xian of Han, the last emperor of Han dynasty died as a duke. 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. Puren was the youngest brother of the final Qing monarch Puyi, who ruled for four years until 1912. There, he was picked up by supporters and driven to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. hb```"qVta1 FsD Next up: A new doc called Plastic China, which played at the Sundance Film Festival and screened as part of the Documentary Fortnight at the Museum of Modern Art on February 23rd. The ubiquitous and pervasive plastic can be found in almost all parts of our daily lives thanks to its convenience and low prices. what happened to the families in plastic china. 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. The film premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in November 2016, and was shown at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Hand-picked stories once a fortnight. A Chinese family has been forced to give up their pet dog after realizing they had actually adopted a black bear. Boost this article This includes a ban on free shopping and carrier bags a. 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. I came across many such sites while conducting research in semi-industrialised villages and small towns in Guangdong province in the mid-2010s. A familiar margarine packet among the mountains of rubbish in a backyard recycling facility on China. 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. 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. Updated. Along the belt, human workers pick and channel what is valuable (bottles, cardboard, aluminium cans) into sorting chutes. "People act in funny ways," she says. Global mismanaged waste in total. 9 U4W6}-+c\y^xu^`88^iY :\`PrAiSvF5f19/L2Jh206X Yet, something in Plastic China must have bothered Chinese censors, and prompted them to intervene. His descendants inherited his d. However, it is also strongly implied that Yijies gender played a role in her parents decision to neglect her education. to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. For years, even social scientists have supported a widely held belief that Chinese . His research explores Chinas state project of ecological modernisation from the angle of e-waste reuse and recycling. Something doesn't add up here. When the inevitable collapse came, most of the companies went bankrupt, leaving city authorities having to pay to clean up the mess. "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. 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. And so he set off to the rural region where he encountered a lot of resistance from those involved in the remedial waste management industry. 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. Made in China publications are open access and always available as a free download. siQ6_{#WP(*K9-4GF(NTZ,GI2RV#PF"@(!9BI-$(E^D]ut(nK Jgu")( D)" https%3A%2F%2Fearth.org%2Fchina-plastic-pollution%2F. It now collects its community's plastic trash and turns it into fuel. of plastic inputs in oceans while putting China at 7%. Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. November 15, 2022. Kate Sheehy. To compensate for this narrow focus, we need to look beyond the predominant reading. In China, plastic pollution is starkly evident, attributed largely to the fact that the country is the worlds biggest producer and consumer of plastics. The Pengs precarious existence and the fact that they are basically left to fend for themselves is striking for both Chinese and foreign viewers. Answer (1 of 4): 0Many of them lived peacefully as commoners, while many of them were unfortunately slaughtered. 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. 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. 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. Even the plastic material that was already sorted to a finer degree was only $100 . 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. Families were already having fewer children in the 1970s, before the policy took force in 1979. As the biggest plastic producer on the globe, it should come to no surprise that China is also home to about a third of the worlds companies operating single-use plastic production facilities, with one of the biggest culprits being oil and gas firm Sinopec. 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. 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). 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. "Our main products are paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, mixed plastics . CNN . 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