This prompted the Chinese government to introduce a raft of new laws and regulations to limit plastic waste in 2020, and announced a plan for 2021 to 2025 which aims to further improve the management of the entire chain of plastic pollution. The film premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in November 2016, and was shown at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Either the government is already losing faith in the reality of its implementation, or it needs a bigger budget for advertising. 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? Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. 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. China has imported 45 percent of the world's plastic refuse since 1992, allowing many other countries, including the United States, to dodge the question of how to process the unwanted material, a . But Peng has no money, and anyway, Yi-Jie has to take care of her younger siblings and contribute to the recycling work. Alex Wong/Getty Images The daughter of a young plastic factory worker, Yi Jie, looks over a heap of plastic while cradling her baby sibling. 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. 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. All together, these measures are aligned with the countrys 2060 carbon neutrality targets. A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste. 0000001315 00000 n
We desperately need large-scale investment into domestic recycling plants paired with less garbage being tossed aside every day by us, the ones who buy and discard, day in and day out. There is one obvious, clear, imperative measure that we all must make a priority- we must reduce the amount of plastics we use every day. China has been taking US plastic waste for three decades. 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. It followed reports in the Age last month that revealed thousands tonnes of soft. This alters the one-child policy that was introduced in 1978 to control the . The British colony simply. Viewers learn that this has to do with her status as a migrant, her familys meagre earnings, and her fathers alcoholism. 2014 and Persico 2010) and Zhao Liang (see Sorace 2017), among other leading Chinese independent filmmakers. 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. Lu says the harassment became so savage that elderly residents of Linyi became afraid to leave their homes out of fear they might be kidnapped. 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. It was vicious," he says. 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). Yet reports 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 of plastic inputs in oceans while putting China at 7%. Her son is part of the last generation of children in China whose births were ruled illegal at the time. The smiles that break across their grubby faces belie a bleak existence for the families that scrape by sorting plastic waste. There are over 5,000 little unregulated recycling plants in the town alone, giving Wang plenty of subject options. Written on 17 January 2019. 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. 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. The success of the first film got Wang invited to California, where he toured recycling plants as part of his next round of research. 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. 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. 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. 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. What is the current state of plastic pollution in China and how does the country deal with it? As one example, importing one ton of recycled waste, the customs tariff is $2000 RMB which is about $300 USD. 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. hide caption. Climate. 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. "Our main products are paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, mixed plastics . 2a cmAAASDMn,!T+FrHV`)sbg:\8B@}Np(D3uOGh1.\8}) n"%UtZ-)9Kn>{b^xFrn{g(dX
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O. It's margarine tubs, clamshells, deli containers. "I thought this is it if I do not have this child, my body will not be able to have any more.". He used a pickax to drive them off and was imprisoned for that for half a year. Trailer for 'Plastic China' film by director Wang Jiuliang. Such a context makes it very risky for the latter to adopt a long-term perspective and invest in new equipment or techniques. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and . 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. Meanwhile, mass urbanization and rural migration have changed the financial and social calculus, making . He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's. Hand-picked stories once a fortnight. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. Her dreams are daydreams, a way for her to escape the harsh reality she experiences on a daily basis. A deliberate shift in consumption will not happen overnight. Some scenes in the film take place in a dumpsite, where waste is burned in the open, or next to a river, where it accumulates. Plastic films, plastic bags, the plastic wrapping that comes around a lot of packaged goods, that all goes into the garbage. 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). It was followed very selectively. {&L Q4t)o('aJ. The Qing . "People act in funny ways," she says. Anxious that rapid population growth would strain the country's welfare systems and state-planned economy, the Chinese state began limiting how many children families could have in the late 1970s. 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. 0000010492 00000 n
"Women have it all figured out now they won't have more kids even when they're told to have more!" Editor's note: This story contains descriptions that may be disturbing. 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. , 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. He and his wife persevered and had three sons. Today, the world produces nearly 350 million tonnes of plastic waste, which is projected to double by 2040 if no action is taken. On average, only about 17% of the plastic used in China is recycled in some shape or form. This is regrettable, for two main reasons. Han Dynasty Emperor Xian of Han, the last emperor of Han dynasty died as a duke. 0000035786 00000 n
In response to those protests, the Chinese government drastically rolled back its strict policies for . 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. One ton of unsorted waste was sold to China for about $9. 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. In sum, China's exercise of power has been more hard than soft. 43 0 obj
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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. When combined, the plastic pollution situation in China may seem bleak, raising fears of its monumental and possibly irreversible environmental damage and degradation. But Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, cautions there is no definitive answer. 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). The new documentary 'Plastic China' plunges into the dirty side of recycling. The U.S., Japan and Germany are all at the top of the list when it comes to exporting their used plastic. By the container load, the cast-off plastic comes from Korea, Europe and the US. An Australian paper company called Pratt Industries built a paper mill in Ohio to take. 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. ". This is on top of the fact that Chinas population is growing by 0.5% on average annually. So the mother went into hiding to carry her son to term. 0000017207 00000 n
In China, plastic pollution is starkly evident . Among contributing factors was Plastic China (suliao wangguo, 2016), a documentary directed by Wang Jiuliang. What could the family planning officials have done to her? A Chinese family has been forced to give up their pet dog after realizing they had actually adopted a black bear. How much waste does China produce? Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images The mother of one of these middle schoolers holds her son close. 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. Plastic China 's portrait of a migrant worker and his family, and the factory's ambitious owner, is touching and saddening, and puts a human face on the problems caused by China's rush to. 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.
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