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. "Women have it all figured out now they won't have more kids even when they're told to have more!" %PDF-1.4 % Almost certainly, a proportion will have come from the homes, or more specifically the recycling bins, of Australia. She builds forts inside the recyclables and rifles through Western magazines, piecing together clues about life beyond the garbage and enriching it with fantasies. The terror of such enforcement of birth limits was widespread in Linyi, even if residents were not themselves planning on giving birth. 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. 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. Global plastic waste generation by country. In the film, the main character, a bright girl named Peng Yijie, does not attend school, although she is already 11 years old. Some demographers in China argue that instituting birth limits was necessary for keeping birth rates low. 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. Viewers learn that this has to do with her status as a migrant, her familys meagre earnings, and her fathers alcoholism. It now collects its community's plastic trash and turns it into fuel. Where Wang achieves sentimentality and awareness at displaying his subjects somber existence, he fails in giving his audience any objective information about the health, social, or environmental impacts of the Chinese recycling process. At that point, it was already the world's most populous country. His descendants inherited his d. 2a cmAAASDMn,!T+FrHV`)sbg:\8B@}Np(D3uOGh1.\8}) n"%UtZ-)9Kn>{b^xFrn{g(dX J1( O. The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children. 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). NPR isn't using her name to protect her identity because of the trauma she suffered. All the issues mentioned above are central to Wangs narrative in Plastic China. On average, only about 17% of the plastic used in China is recycled in some shape or form. 0000001806 00000 n Plastic China by director Wang Jilang is a story of two families, one of which owns this plastic recycling facility while the other family is employed there. 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. Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. Ten years after China's infant milk tragedy, parents still won't trust their babies to local formula . 0000439869 00000 n AFP via Getty Images 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. Ran Zheng for NPR https%3A%2F%2Fearth.org%2Fchina-plastic-pollution%2F. "Our main products are paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, mixed plastics . And in May, after a new census showed the birth rate had slowed, China raised the cap to three children. 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 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. Several experts I engaged with in recent months put forward the idea that the film prompted officials in Beijing to take this kind of action, or at least influenced them significantly (see also L 2018). This is regrettable, for two main reasons. In sum, China's exercise of power has been more hard than soft. That's up from 152 million ten years. to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. B!$H BBAZ[:]nu+n:utvw=vvw9}#AaH"\mAnirF~'U44`~4w~gqci)kJ 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. 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. 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. Katherine Martinko is a writer and expert in sustainable living. 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. Her dreams are daydreams, a way for her to escape the harsh reality she experiences on a daily basis. Welcome to Wang Jiuliangs 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 target . Single-use plastics are also made almost entirely from fossil fuels. New York CNN Business . In the film, Peng Wenyuanwho comes from Sichuan province, belongs to the Yi ethnic group, and is almost illiteratecomplains repeatedly about his salary. 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. Global mismanaged waste in total. 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. Why won't China remove all caps? But even there Johnson found numerous stories of families going to great lengths . The rationale for implementing the policy was to reduce the growth rate of China's enormous population. Dr. Steven Svehlak and Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Payman Simoni agree. When asked about the dangers facing him, Wang just shrugged. hide caption. A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste. But Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, cautions there is no definitive answer. The doctors strangled or drowned those babies.". The Yangtze river, the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world, is an important water body in China. Made in China publications are open access and always available as a free download. Image by: Our World in Data. 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. 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. 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. The news hit hard in the United States, which is home to about 60,000 children adopted from China, mostly girls. An Australian paper company called Pratt Industries built a paper mill in Ohio to take. During that time, imperial China was replaced by the Republic of China. 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. However, the films relevance extends far beyond the issue of waste management. Trailer for 'Plastic China' film by director Wang Jiuliang. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. The U.S. used to send a lot of its plastic waste to China to get recycled. While more time is needed to analyse the bans impacts domestically, it has had rippling effects across global plastic pollution and management. what happened to the families in plastic china. Her worries these days are more mundane. His research explores Chinas state project of ecological modernisation from the angle of e-waste reuse and recycling. 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. ! Wang recalled. Indeed, they cut across borders and sectors of economic activity. 0000023031 00000 n 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 China, the film went viral in January 2017 before quickly disappearing from the Internetthereby following a pattern that affects most of Wangs work (Zhao 2017). Written on 17 January 2019. Han Dynasty Emperor Xian of Han, the last emperor of Han dynasty died as a duke. For decades, China has relied on superficial policies targeting plastic to reduce waste in the country. Garbage collectors called rag and bone men ply the alleys of the cities, pedaling . In other words, though it looks good exteriorly, it has a lot of interior problems (Kanthor 2017). This means that people eating fish have also been consuming plastics. 0000000936 00000 n A familiar margarine packet among the mountains of rubbish in a backyard recycling facility on China. "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. 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