Some demographers in China argue that instituting birth limits was necessary for keeping birth rates low. After 25 years as the world's salvage king, China refused to buy any recycled plastic scrap that wasn't 99.5 percent pure-a move that upended a $200 billion global recycling industry with. When the ancestral temples were destroyed most families lost the records of their extended family. 0000001781 00000 n The success of the first film got Wang invited to California, where he toured recycling plants as part of his next round of research. Medical staff massage babies at an infant care center in Yongquan, in Chongqing municipality, in southwest China, on Dec. 15, 2016. 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. Alex Wong/Getty Images 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. 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. Andy Wong/AP China had 1 million more births in 2016 than in 2015, following the end of the one-child policy. In China, plastic pollution is starkly evident . 0000010125 00000 n 0000002606 00000 n ". 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 Ocean Cleanup aims to remove 90 per cent of plastic waste from oceans The organisation has designed 600-metre-long plastic barriers designed to passively gather plastic as they float. Meanwhile, mass urbanization and rural migration have changed the financial and social calculus, making . Updated. 43 0 obj <> endobj xref 43 32 0000000016 00000 n This change will not be easy, but it must be done. The suit led to an apology from the authorities in Linyi and a reduction in the kidnappings, beatings and forced abortions. Wangs 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. 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? Today, the ongoing secrecy and censorship makes it impossible to know how many died that night. The family, who lives near the city of Kunming in Yunnan province, adopted what . ", A child walks near government propaganda one of which reads "1.3 billion people united" on the streets of Beijing, China, Tuesday, March 8, 2016. A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste. 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. What was she hiding from? 0000024672 00000 n discovered that all 21 species of sea fish and freshwater fish from Chinese waters that were examined have ingested plastic. Global plastic waste generation by country. Based on current rates, the countrys total population could reach up to 1.46 billion by 2028, resulting in even high amounts of waste. China is also by far the largest source of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution. No one can afford that," she complains. Officials in her village were actively policing families under the one-child policy. The policy permeates through Chinese society in other, sometimes unexpected ways. Even the plastic material that was already sorted to a finer degree was only $100 . LINYI, China Outside, rain falls. 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. After all, this type of message is consistent with recent official discourse and practice, which lay great emphasis on environmental protection, leadership in global trade, and national sovereignty. Answer (1 of 7): Hi, from the grandchild of 3 families that would probably be considered bourgeois before 49 Family 1: Paternal Grandfather family, granted this was a quirky case as he was the son of a landlord (the most dominant family in that village for sure. "People act in funny ways," she says. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. Additionally, China currently tops the list of biggest greenhouse gas emitters though the US overtakes it for emissions per capita. , where in 2019, it reportedly churned out about 5.3 million tonnes of plastics. , resulting in mounting plastic packaging. ! Wang recalled. 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. In other words, though it looks good exteriorly, it has a lot of interior problems (Kanthor 2017). 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. 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. Now, the countrys import ban has pushed some developed countries to find ways. 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. He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the China Centre, University of Oxford. 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. 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. HdU{PSW? 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. (Liu 2014). 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. When combined, the plastic pollution situation in China may seem bleak, raising fears of its monumental and possibly irreversible environmental damage and degradation. Yet the authorities still only allow couples to have three children. 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. Following the accepted narrative about China, its citizens might be expected to worship sons and disdain daughters. 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. Her son is part of the last generation of children in China whose births were ruled illegal at the time. what happened to the families in plastic china. 0000001204 00000 n In conclusion, Plastic China constitutes a broad reflexion on social problems and dilemmas in the post-socialist era. 0000009529 00000 n 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). He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's one-child policy. It has been slow to completely dismantle its massive family planning bureaucracy built up over the past four decades. 0000010492 00000 n This means that people eating fish have also been consuming plastics. Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. 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. Bright-eyed children run between heaping piles of plastic, a worn-out worker spends his meager wages on alcohol, and a preteen girl gazes solemnly at Western product advertisements she picks out of the monstrous piles of trash around her home. There are clear signs that this space is shrinking nowadays, yet this does not stop many independent filmmakers from pursuing their mission (Berry 2017). Puren was the youngest brother of the final Qing monarch Puyi, who ruled for four years until 1912. Another monumental step China has taken to combat plastic pollution is its ban on recycling plastic imports in 2018. After recording only 213 deaths and about 13,000 cases of COVID-19 from January 2020 to early 2022, the city is swamped by the current Omicron wave, which began at the start of the year and has . The British colony simply. It followed reports in the Age last month that revealed thousands tonnes of soft. Its river basin comprises one-fifth of the countrys land area, and supports and houses nearly one-third of the population. trailer <<4243014C4E284DEB98C83941C307E81B>]/Prev 529831>> startxref 0 %%EOF 74 0 obj <>stream Among contributing factors was Plastic China (suliao wangguo, 2016), a documentary directed by Wang Jiuliang. 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. Image by: Our World in Data. 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. 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. 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 . 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). His mother watches him approvingly. Get focused newsletters especially designed to be concise and easy to digest. 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. Ontario. 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. 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. A further issue highlighted in the film is that of conspicuous consumption. 0000023031 00000 n The Pengs precarious existence and the fact that they are basically left to fend for themselves is striking for both Chinese and foreign viewers. At that point, it was already the world's most populous country. In China, rural migrants are generally registered in their place of origin but spend most of their time living far away from their hometowns. 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 . Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. When the inevitable collapse came, most of the companies went bankrupt, leaving city authorities having to pay to clean up the mess. The seventh child, a boy, Liu Zhuang drowned at the age of five, and his mother says she cries every. The new documentary 'Plastic China' plunges into the dirty side of recycling. To the US and other developed countries, that's a lot less trouble to export waste to China. 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. Since taking office as president, Xi Jinping has striven to distinguish his government from the previous one. 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. New York CNN Business . Kate Sheehy. 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. 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. In the film, the main character, a bright girl named Peng Yijie, does not attend school, although she is already 11 years old. !(^^\(c-RUFkEE 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. Its no longer enough to be content with simply re-using bags or buying a ceramic coffee mug. "The one-child policy was not the only thing that happened in China in the 1980s and 1990s," Gietel-Basten says. He came to the throne in 1908 at two-years-old and ruled until February 1912, when he was forced to abdicate. 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. The Yangtze river, the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world, is an important water body in China. 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. During that time, imperial China was replaced by the Republic of China. 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. It was followed very selectively. Twenty-something Kun is a hard worker with a dream of buying a new car to boost his social status. 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2022-11-07