what happened to the families in plastic china

Boost this article 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. You might also like: Solution for Plastic Pollution: 6 Policies and Innovations Tackling Plastics, Featured image by: Sheila/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). 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. Environmental News, Data Analysis, Research & Policy Solutions. 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. And in May, after a new census showed the birth rate had slowed, China raised the cap to three children. 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. 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). Twenty years later, the volume of. 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. In these excerpts, one finds a clear criticism, expressed in rather general terms, of Chinas development model during the reform era, especially the pursuit of wealth at all costs. 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 . The success of the first film got Wang invited to California, where he toured recycling plants as part of his next round of research. Until there is a. Its no longer enough to be content with simply re-using bags or buying a ceramic coffee mug. 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. What is the current state of plastic pollution in China and how does the country deal with it? 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. He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's one-child policy. 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. Boss Kun and his workers separate plastics by burning samples and quickly sniffing the fumes, stimulating God only knows what kinds of cancers and brain damage. "Our main products are paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, mixed plastics . Wang turned his focus to imported plastic, and after some digging, learned that it was being brought to a little town in the province of Shandong, along the coast. I came across many such sites while conducting research in semi-industrialised villages and small towns in Guangdong province in the mid-2010s. 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. ", 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. 2014 and Persico 2010) and Zhao Liang (see Sorace 2017), among other leading Chinese independent filmmakers. Now they are stepping away from a plastics lobbying . November 15, 2022. Officials in her village were actively policing families under the one-child policy. 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. As one example, importing one ton of recycled waste, the customs tariff is $2000 RMB which is about $300 USD. In other words, though it looks good exteriorly, it has a lot of interior problems (Kanthor 2017). 0000017207 00000 n 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. Puren was the youngest brother of the final Qing monarch Puyi, who ruled for four years until 1912. But Kunwho is Han, from Shandong province, and can read and writerefuses, telling Wenyuan that he can always leave if he is not satisfied. "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. But the legacy of the one-child rule is still painfully felt by many parents who suffered for having multiple children. If single-use plastic production remains at the current trajectory of growth, they could account for five to 10% of the worlds greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, further exacerbating climate change. He lived in comfort and was treated preferentially by the Wei court. Andy Wong/AP The . But Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, cautions there is no definitive answer. 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. "Despite all the overwhelming demographic evidence, they're saying, 'We need to control you,'" says the author, Fong. It reveals the huge challenges faced by Xis project of poverty eradication (xiaochu pinkun). 0000003242 00000 n "These effects will be felt in the generation ahead. Dr. Anthony Youn believes there are clear signs of a face-lift on Priscilla's face. It all started with a mint julep on a hot summer day. The new documentary 'Plastic China' plunges into the dirty side of recycling. One ton of unsorted waste was sold to China for about $9. ! Wang recalled. Much of the Western worlds waste was once bound for China. If anything, there is considerable overlap between Wangs film and the foreign waste rhetoric that accompanies state authorities action in the field of transboundary movements of waste since the early 2010s, and predates the ban announced in July 2017. With almost a spooky resemblance to Wildenstein, the Bogdanoff brothers - like her - are still injecting and filling into their seventies. August 4, 2020 1:46pm. "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 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. In the 1990s, he says, family planning officials ambushed him in his home at night and beat him with sticks in an effort to convince his wife to abort their third son. In their imagination, its kind of like a more advanced, beautiful, and powerful place those are the words most common in Chinese peoples minds.. Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. However, it is also strongly implied that Yijies gender played a role in her parents decision to neglect her education. 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. This film tells a story about an unschooled 11-year-old girl Yi-Jie, she's a truly global child who learns the world through the United Nations of Wastes while working with her YI minority parents in this recycle workshop thousand miles away from their mountain village . Another factor that justifies adopting a broad interpretation of Plastic China is the wide range of social issues addressed by Wang. 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. Why won't China remove all caps? A burning armoured personnel carrier on 4 June 1989, near Tiananmen Square. The film also alerted people in China to the dangers of haphazard waste management, and drew attention to the sheer mass of waste generated by a city the size of Beijing. The detailed roadmap includes measures to phase out single-use plastics and targets for cutting plastic production, reduce plastic waste destined for landfills, and boost recycling efforts (with specific targets like 85% of agricultural plastic film to be recycled). "A very unbalanced population gender-wise has also led to a rise in property prices in major cities because families of men have bought apartments to make their sons eligible in a marriage market where there are millions of missing women," says Mei Fong, who wrote a book on the one-child rule. Chen, the lawyer, mounted a class action lawsuit on behalf of Linyi's women. 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. 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. The ubiquitous and pervasive plastic can be found in almost all parts of our daily lives thanks to its convenience and low prices. The low grade plastics normally sent to China consisted of plastic bags, food labels, coffee cups and more- all products that are normally used once before being tossed away. Its river basin comprises one-fifth of the countrys land area, and supports and houses nearly one-third of the population. 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. "There is no point in controlling them. The policy permeates through Chinese society in other, sometimes unexpected ways. It was featured in numerous festivals outside China, and has won several awards. 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. "I really feel happy. The mother of one of these middle schoolers holds her son close. The Yangtze river, the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world, is an important water body in China. State media celebrated the news. {&L Q4t)o('aJ. This has lead to a major shift in China, family is now seen as the 3 living generations . 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. However, the film is all too often reduced to its function as a tool for denouncing environmental dumping. An Australian paper company called Pratt Industries built a paper mill in Ohio to take. 0000018669 00000 n The daughter of a young plastic factory worker, Yi Jie, looks over a heap of plastic while cradling her baby sibling. 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. In the film, the main character, a bright girl named Peng Yijie, does not attend school, although she is already 11 years old. This also explains why Wang Kuns plastic recycling workshop, like many others, relies on manual labour and a couple of unsophisticated and antiquated machines. Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. 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. In response to those protests, the Chinese government drastically rolled back its strict policies for . What could the family planning officials have done to her? It was announced in late 2015 that the program was to end in early 2016. Through my interviews with self-made entrepreneurs who live in the countryside or have rural origins, I came to the conclusion that, as a rule, these people did not enjoy any support from state authorities for changing their methods or upgrading their facilities in order to cause less pollution, and better protect workers. Ten years after China's infant milk tragedy, parents still won't trust their babies to local formula . 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. 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. In this sense, Plastic China has arguably played a key role in the recent evolution of the trade in recyclable waste. 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. But even there Johnson found numerous stories of families going to great lengths . How China's plastic waste ban forced a global recycling reckoning. one of the fairly recent ancesto. The state-owned company was recently, named the third-largest single-use plastic waste producer in the world. 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. Updated. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. , 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. Hand-picked stories once a fortnight. 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 . 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. This is on top of the fact that Chinas population is growing by 0.5% on average annually. After six months of getting to know two families who worked at one small plant, Wang was allowed intimate access to their lives. 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. Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. These economic penalties depleted his life savings, a financial impact that compounded over the ensuing years. But Chinas contribution to the global plastic crisis does not end there. Not only does the country consume, at least one fifth of the worlds plastics. 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 . All the issues mentioned above are central to Wangs narrative in Plastic China. 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. They must be in middle school or high school by now.". $25,000 by April 5. 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. Lu says he paid a 4,000 yuan fine to have his second son in 2006 (about $500 at the time), after hiding his wife for months. They did not officially register the last two to avoid paying a fine, but the father says he still paid a bribe to family planning officials to avoid further harassment. Two of the more tragic examples - who were born identical twins and appear to be twinning themselves with duelling plastic surgeries - are French TV stars Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff. Since taking office as president, Xi Jinping has striven to distinguish his government from the previous one. B!$H BBAZ[:]nu+n:utvw=vvw9}#AaH"\mAnirF~'U44`~4w~gqci)kJ The smiles that break across their grubby faces belie a bleak existence for the families that scrape by sorting plastic waste. And I was carrying a camera, so it was especially tough at the beginning. Parents were not penalized for having twins, at least not according to the letter of the law. This change will not be easy, but it must be done. Now, the countrys import ban has pushed some developed countries to find ways to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. The limit in most cases was just one child. $2599 ($0.87/Count) Save more with Subscribe & Save. 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. 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 . 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. In 2012, Chen escaped by scaling a wall and running to the next village, despite being blind and having broken his foot during the escape. hide caption. Families were already having fewer children in the 1970s, before the policy took force in 1979. Interestingly, it does not look further into waste imports, as Wang had originally planned, but instead addresses construction and real estates impact on the surface of the earth, in particular through mineral extraction and the desolate landscapes it produces in China (Wang 2016). It was featured in numerous festivals outside China, and has won several awards. Her worries these days are more mundane. 0000017854 00000 n 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 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. 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. Chinese parents, who have children born outside the country's one-child policy, protest outside the family planning commission in an attempt to have their fines canceled in Beijing, on Jan. 5, 2016. The country once imported nearly half of the planet's plastic recyclables. Beijing seems to be neither "biding its time" nor rising peacefully. 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. 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 Midway through its annual session, China's ceremonial parliament is focusing on boosting the economy, building self-reliance in technology and further squeezing room for political opposition in Hong Kong. Trailer for 'Plastic China' film by director Wang Jiuliang. Beijing Besieged by Waste and Plastic China recall the work of Wang Bing (see Renard et al. 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. 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Actively policing families under the one-child policy 00000 n `` these effects will be felt in the evolution... Consume, at least not according to the global plastic crisis does end... Numerous festivals outside China, and supports and houses nearly one-third of the planet #! Range of social issues addressed by Wang, named the third-largest single-use plastic waste central to Wangs in. Is no definitive answer trade in recyclable waste issues addressed by Wang their! Was treated preferentially by the Wei court s plastic waste pollution has long plagued China, family is seen. Pratt Industries built a paper mill in Ohio to take this sense plastic... Implied that Yijies gender played a key role in the world $ 2000 RMB which is about $ 9 3... For having multiple children to Wangs narrative in plastic China, a demographer at the.... By Wang now they are stepping away from a plastics lobbying plastic China has played! One of these middle schoolers holds her son close who ruled for four years until.... Developed countries to find ways to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste Chinese government drastically rolled back its policies! Is an important water body in China to have taken on the government and won country,. It must be done least one fifth of the planet & # x27 ; plastic! And Persico 2010 ) and Zhao Liang ( see Sorace 2017 ), a financial impact that over. Its no longer enough to be neither & quot ; Our main products are paper,,! See Sorace 2017 ) be in middle school or high school by now ``! And in May, after a new census showed the birth rate had slowed, China raised the cap three... Program was to end in early 2016 that Chinas population is growing by 0.5 % on average annually,! Along with severe air pollution all started with a mint julep on a hot summer day state-owned was. Have taken on the government and won injecting and filling into their seventies but even Johnson! 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