what happened to the families in plastic china. 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. She demurs, her voice growing quiet. hide caption. 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. While more time is needed to analyse the bans impacts domestically, it has had rippling effects across global plastic pollution and management. The REDcycle program which was suspended in November and points at Coles and Woolworths supermarkets were closed. As research on plastic and its detriments on the environment increasingly pop up on our news feeds, its obvious that weve reached a breaking point. 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 . A further issue highlighted in the film is that of conspicuous consumption. China Says It Will Allow Couples to Have 3 Children, Up From 2 The move is the Communist Party's latest attempt to reverse declining birthrates and avert a population crisis, but experts say it. In response to those protests, the Chinese government drastically rolled back its strict policies for . State media celebrated the news. The film also resonated with the study of Chinas so-called informal recycling world that I conducted in the mid-2010s (Schulz 2018). 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. A recent book helps explain how PRC leaders think about the . ", A mother and a grandmother take care of a child in Beijing on Jan. 1, 2016. 0000023031 00000 n It has been slow to completely dismantle its massive family planning bureaucracy built up over the past four decades. Just like Beijing Besieged by Waste, the movie uncovers a gnarly scene beyond the cosmopolitan city. Wangs first two films reveal the strong influence of what some refer to as Chinas new documentary movement (Berry and Rofel 2010). Posted in Article, Work of Arts. Among contributing factors was Plastic China (suliao wangguo, 2016), a documentary directed by Wang Jiuliang. When combined, the plastic pollution situation in China may seem bleak, raising fears of its monumental and possibly irreversible environmental damage and degradation. hide caption. 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. A burning armoured personnel carrier on 4 June 1989, near Tiananmen Square. For some, the pain is still too much to bear. 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. Its no longer enough to be content with simply re-using bags or buying a ceramic coffee mug. She babysits, cooks, works and teaches her three younger siblings while her parents do the same back-breaking work day in and day out. But the country is not ignorant of its environmental impacts, and has moved to take more aggressive strides to combat this exponentially growing problem. to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. In August 2014, the little girl was able to go to school and she is in third grade now. Ng Han Guan/AP In this essay, I argue that Plastic China should be considered as a rich social commentary and critique, and interpreted in the light of Chinas tradition of independent documentary-making in the reform era. The target . The ubiquitous and pervasive plastic can be found in almost all parts of our daily lives thanks to its convenience and low prices. So the mother went into hiding to carry her son to term. 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 aspect of the film that most stuck with me personally was how Plastic China depicted the poor standard of waste management in rural China. It has been ten months since China closed its doors to the world's recycling waste. The . From Jun 1 of that year, customers began to be charged for plastic shopping bags, and a total ban of ultrathin (less than 0.025mm thick) bags came into action. Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. 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. This has lead to a major shift in China, family is now seen as the 3 living generations . 0000024672 00000 n The rationale for implementing the policy was to reduce the growth rate of China's enormous population. 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. "All we can do is go on living," she says. It followed reports in the Age last month that revealed thousands tonnes of soft. 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. 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. China is also by far the largest source of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution. 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. The family obviously lives on very little, and Wang Kun, the breadwinner, has a possibly serious affliction that affects his capacity to work, and remains undiagnosed and untreated, partly because he fears that seeking medical attention could result in high expenses. Updated. In the film we witness Kun and his family looking for a new car, despite the fact that their old family van continues to serve them fairly well. Meanwhile, mass urbanization and rural migration have changed the financial and social calculus, making . 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. Dr. Steven Svehlak and Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Payman Simoni agree. 0000035823 00000 n Initially Feng. It is important to stress that, while these features of Chinas contemporary condition can be observed in rural recycling hubs, they are not unique to these places. 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. The limit in most cases was just one child. Now the world is scrambling to adjust. The rest was buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and . The ban was initiated in January of this year and undoubtedly the shockwaves are being felt in the international community as countries look to Asia for another foreign landfill. 0000000936 00000 n There is something profoundly disturbing in the Wangs purchase of a shiny new sedan car. 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. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. 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. "This was not your average level of policy enforcement. 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. 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 . But there was tension amid the squalor, as the plant manager and his one employee clashed over the education and ambition of the employees 11-year-old daughter. Get focused newsletters especially designed to be concise and easy to digest. Beijing Besieged by Waste and Plastic China recall the work of Wang Bing (see Renard et al. INVERSE 2023 BDG Media, Inc. All rights reserved. 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. Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. This targeted Boosting helps us to reach wider audiences aiming to convince the unconvinced, to inform the uninformed, to enlighten the dogmatic. Lu says he paid a 4,000 yuan fine to have his second son in 2006 (about $500 at the time), after hiding his wife for months. By the container load, the cast-off plastic comes from Korea, Europe and the US. 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. It is against this backdrop that Plastic China came out in 2016. 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. Since the first protest on Nov. 26th, demonstrations popped up in every area of the country. 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. It was featured in numerous festivals outside China, and has won several awards. 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). It all started with a mint julep on a hot summer day. The mother of one of these middle schoolers holds her son close. Directors Jiu-liang Wang Genres Documentary Subtitles English [CC] The people who had a stake in it did not welcome the shooting.. 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. Even if I had to go to prison and endure beatings, in the end, these children were able to survive. 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. 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. 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. 0000009529 00000 n your subscription today, Canadian Journalism Foundation Award for Climate Solutions Reporting. "Despite all the overwhelming demographic evidence, they're saying, 'We need to control you,'" says the author, Fong. In China, plastic pollution is starkly evident . Ran Zheng for NPR (Liu 2014). $25,000 by April 5. siQ6_{#WP(*K9-4GF(NTZ,GI2RV#PF"@(!9BI-$(E^D]ut(nK Jgu")( D)" No full, official . And I was carrying a camera, so it was especially tough at the beginning. 0000035786 00000 n In the last two years, the issue of waste exports to China has attractedconsiderable mediaand public attention. 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. 0000001806 00000 n 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. 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. 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. Without a fundamental cultural shift in our societys grievous over-use of plastic, we will see the same mountains of scraps growing in our pristine backyards just like Peng, Kun, and Yi Jie see everyday. They must be in middle school or high school by now.". 0000439946 00000 n of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution.
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