what happened to the families in plastic china

All together, these measures are aligned with the countrys 2060 carbon neutrality targets. Single-use plastics are also made almost entirely from fossil fuels. But starting in 2005, the authorities began enforcing the policy with a renewed ferocity in Linyi. 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. We promise, no spam! 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. 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. "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. The Pengs precarious existence and the fact that they are basically left to fend for themselves is striking for both Chinese and foreign viewers. to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. He rose to prominence a few years ago thanks to his first film, Beijing Besieged by Waste (laji weicheng, 2012), which revealed the existence of a great number of unauthorised and unmonitored dumpsites around Beijing. First of all his film tackles the problem of labour exploitation. 0000020209 00000 n India News | Latest India News | Read latest and breaking news from India. But the country is not ignorant of its environmental impacts, and has moved to take more aggressive strides to combat this exponentially growing problem. 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. The weeklong meeting of the National People's Congress, which rubber stamps policies approved by the Communist Party leadership, provides a window into government priorities. Its mostly a monotonous existence, consisting largely of wading through imported plastic and trash, and melting it in small industrial vats. Immediately afterwards, he embarked on a new project. 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. Her son is part of the last generation of children in China whose births were ruled illegal at the time. You might also like: Chinas Refusal to Take Back Food Containers Exposes Hong Kongs Broken Plastic Waste Management System. One ton of unsorted waste was sold to China for about $9. That's up from 152 million ten years. Such a context makes it very risky for the latter to adopt a long-term perspective and invest in new equipment or techniques. No one can afford that," she complains. During the reform era, this has prevented them from enjoying key rights and public services in their place of residence. 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. Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. 0000035823 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. Officials in her village were actively policing families under the one-child policy. Ran Zheng for NPR This also explains why Wang Kuns plastic recycling workshop, like many others, relies on manual labour and a couple of unsophisticated and antiquated machines. 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. Anxious about already strained public education and health care systems, China's leadership is reportedly considering ditching limits entirely. 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. 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 . Even before China's ban, only 9 percent of discarded plastic was being recycled, while 12 percent was burned. Image by: Our World in Data. When the ancestral temples were destroyed most families lost the records of their extended family. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Global plastic waste generation by country. 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. Her job at a nearby canning factory refuses to hire her full time, she says, because she is a mother of three and needs to leave every afternoon to pick up her son from school. 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. 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. "I thought this is it if I do not have this child, my body will not be able to have any more.". 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. In sum, China's exercise of power has been more hard than soft. hide caption. Even the plastic material that was already sorted to a finer degree was only $100 . Welcome to Wang Jiuliang's Plastic China, a quiet, intimate look into the lives of two Chinese families barely scraping a living by laboring at a small family run recycling plant. Some businesses have stepped up, too. When asked about the dangers facing him, Wang just shrugged. 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 . ", A mother and a grandmother take care of a child in Beijing on Jan. 1, 2016. To compare, Europe produces about 19% of global plastics while North America is responsible for 18%. 0000019453 00000 n One night, family planning officials approached her husband, intending to pressure him and his wife into ending the pregnancy. https%3A%2F%2Fearth.org%2Fchina-plastic-pollution%2F. Updated. 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. This contrasts with the situation of Wang Qiqi, Kuns son, who is sent to the kindergarten so that he can pick up literacy skills early on in the hope that he will get access to a high-earning job later in life, ideally in an office in Beijingit should be noted, however, that Qiqi is not only a boy, but also an only child. And in May, after a new census showed the birth rate had slowed, China raised the cap to three children. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. 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. 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. 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. The family, who lives near the city of Kunming in Yunnan province, adopted what . 0000000936 00000 n 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. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. 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. 0000003791 00000 n There are over 5,000 little unregulated recycling plants in the town alone, giving Wang plenty of subject options. 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. Twenty-something Kun is a hard worker with a dream of buying a new car to boost his social status. 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 . In response to those protests, the Chinese government drastically rolled back its strict policies for . Plastic China: Directed by Jiuliang Wang. 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. 0000024672 00000 n At that point, it was already the world's most populous country. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. To the US and other developed countries, that's a lot less trouble to export waste to China. 03:15. 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. The U.S. used to send a lot of its plastic waste to China to get recycled. 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. Children ride a toy train at a shopping mall in Beijing, on Oct. 30, 2015. What was she hiding from? 0000001315 00000 n What is the current state of plastic pollution in China and how does the country deal with it? Global mismanaged waste in total. 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. 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. China is also by far the largest source of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution. 0000035786 00000 n 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. 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. hide caption. Welcome to Wang Jiuliangs Plastic China, a quiet, intimate look into the lives of two Chinese families barely scraping a living by laboring at a small family run recycling plant. Today, he lives in Maryland with his family. 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. 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. 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. Medical staff massage babies at an infant care center in Yongquan, in Chongqing municipality, in southwest China, on Dec. 15, 2016. She carried her son to term while hiding in a relative's house. "People act in funny ways," she says. Something doesn't add up here. But Kunwho is Han, from Shandong province, and can read and writerefuses, telling Wenyuan that he can always leave if he is not satisfied. It has been slow to completely dismantle its massive family planning bureaucracy built up over the past four decades. The rest was buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and . 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. But Chinas contribution to the global plastic crisis does not end there. Plastic films, plastic bags, the plastic wrapping that comes around a lot of packaged goods, that all goes into the garbage. Up to 60 per cent of Quebecs plastics went to China before its ban; Halifax is reportedly sending three hundred tonnes of plastic to landfill, and Calgary is sitting on five thousand tonnes of plastic waste, with all of that having gone to China in the past. Much of the Western worlds waste was once bound for China. 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 . All the issues mentioned above are central to Wangs narrative in Plastic China. 0000009053 00000 n 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. China had 1 million more births in 2016 than in 2015, following the end of the one-child policy. There are clear signs that this space is shrinking nowadays, yet this does not stop many independent filmmakers from pursuing their mission (Berry 2017). "There is no use in trying to make sense of society. 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. hide caption. But some babies were alive when they were born and began crying. Acquiring this potent status symbol allows them to have the feelingand give others the impressionthat they have achieved wealth, and moved up the social ladder. 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. siQ6_{#WP(*K9-4GF(NTZ,GI2RV#PF"@(!9BI-$(E^D]ut(nK Jgu")( D)" On Jan. 1, China enacted new legislation allowing all married couples to have two children. The terror of such enforcement of birth limits was widespread in Linyi, even if residents were not themselves planning on giving birth. "If you carry it with you all the time, it gets too tiring.". , where in 2019, it reportedly churned out about 5.3 million tonnes of plastics. But Chinas contribution to the global plastic crisis does not end there. The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children. Now the world is scrambling to adjust. "Other doctors would artificially induce labor. 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.

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