Today, he lives in Maryland with his family. 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. Single-use plastics are also made almost entirely from fossil fuels. 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. "That requires buying them a car, an apartment. The U.S., Japan and Germany are all at the top of the list when it comes to exporting their used plastic. Climate. HdU{PSW? NPR isn't using her name to protect her identity because of the trauma she suffered. China had 1 million more births in 2016 than in 2015, following the end of the one-child policy. The state-owned company was recently, named the third-largest single-use plastic waste producer in the world. In one interview about the film, Wang stated that: China is a country that is facelifted, concealed, faked and unnatural. How much waste does China produce? 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. 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. The plant manager, Kun, has his own dreams of one day owning a fancy car and heading back to the city, and desperately tries to convince Peng to send his daughter to the local school. "This was not your average level of policy enforcement. These economic penalties depleted his life savings, a financial impact that compounded over the ensuing years. Yet, something in Plastic China must have bothered Chinese censors, and prompted them to intervene. 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. Alex Wong/Getty Images 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. Last October, Jian Feng, a man reportedly from northern China, sued and divorced his wife after she had a daughter who was "incredibly ugly" and did not resemble either parent. The main character is the employee's daughter, who never gets sent to school because she is helping her parents watch her younger siblings and sort through mountains of shredded plastic. This brings us to the topic of censorship. In the film, the main character, a bright girl named Peng Yijie, does not attend school, although she is already 11 years old. He has vowed to break with the past, and usher in a new normal (xin changtai)later morphing into a new era (xin shidai)in which the countrys true wealth would reside in clear waters and green mountains (lshui qingshan), and its prosperity would rely on moderate and sustainable growth. 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. 0000003242 00000 n Plastic China: Directed by Jiuliang Wang. She wanted to avoid the "family planning officials" in her home village, just outside Linyi, a city of 11 million in China's northern Shandong province, where the policy's enforcement was especially violent. Almost certainly, a proportion will have come from the homes, or more specifically the recycling bins, of Australia. Even before China's ban, only 9 percent of discarded plastic was being recycled, while 12 percent was burned. But some babies were alive when they were born and began crying. Today's top India news headlines, news on Indian politics, elections, government, business, technology, and Bollywood. 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. 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. We promise, no spam! A further issue highlighted in the film is that of conspicuous consumption. Its actually incredible that the film, which calls into question the Chinese governments devotion to environmentalism and the welfare of its people, actually made it out of the country. 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. 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. 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. Plastic films, plastic bags, the plastic wrapping that comes around a lot of packaged goods, that all goes into the garbage. what happened to the families in plastic china. 0000016680 00000 n China boosts electric car fleet for public transport, Support award-winning independent journalism with 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). of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution. 0000003466 00000 n 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. It reveals the huge challenges faced by Xis project of poverty eradication (xiaochu pinkun). Image by: Our World in Data. One first reason why Plastic China should be considered as a comprehensive reflection on the contemporary condition in China is that this is consistent with the directors intention. The state-owned company was recently named the third-largest single-use plastic waste producer in the world, where in 2019, it reportedly churned out about 5.3 million tonnes of plastics. Dr. Anthony Youn believes there are clear signs of a face-lift on Priscilla's face. 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. They take her elsewhere, to a place where she can picture a better life, andmost damning of allit looks like this could be abroad. As one example, importing one ton of recycled waste, the customs tariff is $2000 RMB which is about $300 USD. Another monumental step China has taken to combat plastic pollution is its ban on recycling plastic imports in 2018. 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 . one of the fairly recent ancesto. India News | Latest India News | Read latest and breaking news from India. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Mao's attempts to remove the family from the center of Chinese life ultimately failed, but not before destroying a few aspects of traditional culture. But the country is not ignorant of its environmental impacts, and has moved to take more aggressive strides to combat this exponentially growing problem. Part of the reason she demurred when first speaking to NPR was because of how dearly her family fought for his birth. 0000439946 00000 n "Despite all the overwhelming demographic evidence, they're saying, 'We need to control you,'" says the author, Fong. 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. 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. It was featured in numerous festivals outside China, and has won several awards. A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste. 0000002606 00000 n Waste incineration capabilities are to be greatly increased, with the aim of reaching up to burning 800,000 tons of urban domestic waste per day by 2025. On January 1, 2019, a ban on plastic straws in restaurants and other service businesses began in Washington, D.C. Read on for the reasons . When combined, the plastic pollution situation in China may seem bleak, raising fears of its monumental and possibly irreversible environmental damage and degradation. Updated. 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. 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. And in May, after a new census showed the birth rate had slowed, China raised the cap to three children. The . 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. The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children. It is therefore not surprising that Plastic China is generally invoked, both within and outside of China, in connection with the global capitalist system that, for many years at least, allowed relatively rich countries to pass the burden of pollution on to China. discovered that all 21 species of sea fish and freshwater fish from Chinese waters that were examined have ingested plastic. The brother of China's last emperor who was pushed off the throne more than 100 years ago has died. 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. 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. In China, plastic pollution is starkly evident . 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). I saw the manager pointing to some of the garbage that was being sent out and saying, Those are going to China, and I said, what? Landfills stretch out endlessly, enormous hills of colourful plastic bottles loom in the distance, and what we can only presume to be toxic water run-off from the factory is what Jie uses to wet her hair before she brushes it. 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. To compensate for this narrow focus, we need to look beyond the predominant reading. He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's one-child policy. For decades, China has relied on superficial policies targeting plastic to reduce waste in the country. It was followed very selectively. 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. Environmental News, Data Analysis, Research & Policy Solutions. Her body was giving her all the telltale signs that she was pregnant again. Andy Wong/AP On average, only about 17% of the plastic used in China is recycled in some shape or form. Immediately afterwards, he embarked on a new project. However, it is also strongly implied that Yijies gender played a role in her parents decision to neglect her education. 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. 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. In 2020 alone, China produced about 60 million tonnes of plastic waste, yet only 16 million tonnes of which was recycled, according to the China National Resources Recycling Association. 0000009053 00000 n Viewers learn that this has to do with her status as a migrant, her familys meagre earnings, and her fathers alcoholism. Since taking office as president, Xi Jinping has striven to distinguish his government from the previous one. The fact that the children are alive at all makes Chen, the lawyer, feel his seven years in prison and house arrest were all worth it. As a grownup in China, I share a responsibility of finding ways to make the country a better place to live., James Camerons attack on Netflix gets 2 major things wrong and one right, Missing is a worn out techno-thriller less exciting than a doomscroll, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes could be the reboot the franchise needs, By subscribing to this BDG newsletter, you agree to our. 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 . The Yangtze river, the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world, is an important water body in China. 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. 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. For some, the pain is still too much to bear. Priscilla Presley before and after (Source: Radar Online) Experts reckon that the 77-year-old has likely had cheek and lip fillers, skin resurfacing treatments, and a face-lift. For years, even social scientists have supported a widely held belief that Chinese . 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. 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. The Pengs precarious existence and the fact that they are basically left to fend for themselves is striking for both Chinese and foreign viewers. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. 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. ". 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. 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. Chen, the lawyer, mounted a class action lawsuit on behalf of Linyi's women. One night, family planning officials approached her husband, intending to pressure him and his wife into ending the pregnancy. The people who had a stake in it did not welcome the shooting.. It all started with a mint julep on a hot summer day. Yeah, in China you'll meet tons of people who had siblings born while the one-child policy was in effect. The film also resonated with the study of Chinas so-called informal recycling world that I conducted in the mid-2010s (Schulz 2018). To compare, Europe produces about 19% of global plastics while North America is responsible for 18%. 0000001315 00000 n He used a pickax to drive them off and was imprisoned for that for half a year. That part of the industry is very sensitive, and if you have nothing to do with them, you cant get in, Wang said. On average, only about. 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. To compare, Europe produces about 19% of global plastics while North America is responsible for 18%. Even if I had to go to prison and endure beatings, in the end, these children were able to survive. When the ancestral temples were destroyed most families lost the records of their extended family. The terror of such enforcement of birth limits was widespread in Linyi, even if residents were not themselves planning on giving birth. Until there is a. "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. It was shipping goods to Europe and the States and that enabled a cheap process of shipping the scrap back to China in the holds of the. 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. "Our main products are paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, mixed plastics . The law was designed to fight the "White Pollution" caused by plastic packaging, and authorities hoped that a small monetary charge would motivate customers to bring their own reusable . 0000439869 00000 n Some of them were located in rural recycling hubs, but many were not. Puren was the youngest brother of the final Qing monarch Puyi, who ruled for four years until 1912. 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. Back in the 1960s, more than 100 children - mostly abandoned, mostly babies and mostly girls - were brought over from Hong Kong to be adopted by British families. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. 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. Much of the Western worlds waste was once bound for China. His focus on the daily life of two families in a shared domestic space, where exploitation unfolds in an intimate setting, allows him to give an otherwise commonplace phenomenon a particularly raw and emotional dimension. 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. Despite censorship, Wang Jiuliang has managed to reach a wide audience with Plastic China, and have considerable impact. Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. "If you carry it with you all the time, it gets too tiring.". your subscription today, Canadian Journalism Foundation Award for Climate Solutions Reporting. 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. 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 REDcycle program which was suspended in November and points at Coles and Woolworths supermarkets were closed. This film debuted two years ago, but its relevance is striking in the wake of Chinas sudden refusal to continue importing foreign waste. https%3A%2F%2Fearth.org%2Fchina-plastic-pollution%2F. He asks Wang Kun, his boss and the owner of the recycling workshop the Pengs work in, for a raise. In the film, Peng Wenyuanwho comes from Sichuan province, belongs to the Yi ethnic group, and is almost illiteratecomplains repeatedly about his salary. The limit in most cases was just one child. As a result, awareness of the social and environmental impact of the global trade in recyclables has increased substantially, both within and outside of China. Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images 0000020209 00000 n 0000023031 00000 n No full, official . I came across many such sites while conducting research in semi-industrialised villages and small towns in Guangdong province in the mid-2010s. Such a context makes it very risky for the latter to adopt a long-term perspective and invest in new equipment or techniques. 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. Some demographers in China argue that instituting birth limits was necessary for keeping birth rates low. 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 policy was wrong and what we did with Chen was right," says a neighbor of Chen, the lawyer who sued the city of Linyi. "There is no point in controlling them. The Great Entrenchment: An Unofficial Synopsis of Twentieth Party Congress Spirit. hide caption. 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 {&L Q4t)o('aJ. 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. , where in 2019, it reportedly churned out about 5.3 million tonnes of plastics. 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, resulting in mounting plastic packaging. , 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. 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. Since 2014, Chinas household registration system (hukou) is being eased with a view to, among other things, give migrants better access to healthcare and education. His research explores Chinas state project of ecological modernisation from the angle of e-waste reuse and recycling. 2014 and Persico 2010) and Zhao Liang (see Sorace 2017), among other leading Chinese independent filmmakers. 0000035786 00000 n INVERSE 2023 BDG Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Editor's note: This story contains descriptions that may be disturbing. Twenty-something Kun is a hard worker with a dream of buying a new car to boost his social status. Global mismanaged waste in total. "These effects will be felt in the generation ahead. Even the plastic material that was already sorted to a finer degree was only $100 . Wangs camera catches heartbreaking images of Jie, the preteen with a collapsing weight of responsibility on her young shoulders. 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. By the container load, the cast-off plastic comes from Korea, Europe and the US. When the inevitable collapse came, most of the companies went bankrupt, leaving city authorities having to pay to clean up the mess. 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. 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. But starting in 2005, the authorities began enforcing the policy with a renewed ferocity in Linyi. 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. 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