No full, official . The British colony simply. Why won't China remove all caps? "Our main products are paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, mixed plastics . 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. 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. But the legacy of the one-child rule is still painfully felt by many parents who suffered for having multiple children. 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. Made in China publications are open access and always available as a free download. Giving birth to him was a huge risk and she took no chances. 0000000936 00000 n Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. 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. ! Wang recalled. Much like The Swan, a show that ran concurrently . 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. 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. China is also by far the. This brings us to the topic of censorship. That was a period where China's growth started booming. There were virtually no incentives to comply with environmental and safety regulation, and local authorities made little effort to improve the sectorin large part because officials at the village or town level had a stake in rapid, unbridled economic growth. "The one-child policy was not the only thing that happened in China in the 1980s and 1990s," Gietel-Basten says. When I see the value in something, and its necessary to communicate it to a mass audience, any obstacles that might stop me, they dont exist, he said. The Qing . "There is only one China and there is only one one-child policy, so it is kind of impossible to say the real effect of that was [of the policy]," he says. Single-use plastics are also made almost entirely from fossil fuels. Its river basin comprises one-fifth of the countrys land area, and supports and houses nearly one-third of the population. If Plastic Chinas message really boiled down to nothing more than a plea against waste imports and the pollution they cause, then the film would not be an obvious target for the Chinese censors. "Officials would kidnap you if you tried to have two children. 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). Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. 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. 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 . 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. Indeed, they cut across borders and sectors of economic activity. The Yangtze river, the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world, is an important water body in China. A Chinese couple whose son was abducted in a hotel in 1988 have been reunited with him after 32 years. "Women have it all figured out now they won't have more kids even when they're told to have more!" Han Dynasty Emperor Xian of Han, the last emperor of Han dynasty died as a duke. 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. One night in August 2008, the mother made a fateful decision. 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. Families were already having fewer children in the 1970s, before the policy took force in 1979. This is on top of the fact that Chinas population is growing by 0.5% on average annually. At that point, it was already the world's most populous country. A Chinese family has been forced to give up their pet dog after realizing they had actually adopted a black bear. He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the China Centre, University of Oxford. The weeklong meeting of the National People's Congress, which rubber stamps policies approved by the Communist Party leadership, provides a window into government priorities. For decades, China has relied on superficial policies targeting plastic to reduce waste in the country. Enforcement of the policy had begun to loosen by the early 2000s, as horrific stories of forced abortions and botched sterilizations caused policymakers to rethink the rule. She wants to start preparing for her son's marriage a costly endeavor as rural families expect the husband to provide a material guarantee for any future wife. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. 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. Much of the Western worlds waste was once bound for China. New York CNN Business . Now the world is scrambling to adjust. Some demographers in China argue that instituting birth limits was necessary for keeping birth rates low. It was featured in numerous festivals outside China, and has won several awards. This includes a ban on free shopping and carrier bags a 2016 survey data 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. 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. Written on 17 January 2019. The film premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in November 2016, and was shown at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. 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. We all must initiate a seismic cultural shift that sees a serious slowing down of our relentless consumerism. No one can afford that," she complains. 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. And in May, after a new census showed the birth rate had slowed, China raised the cap to three children. "Other doctors would artificially induce labor. 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 . Since taking office as president, Xi Jinping has striven to distinguish his government from the previous one. He asks Wang Kun, his boss and the owner of the recycling workshop the Pengs work in, for a raise. 0000003466 00000 n Another factor that justifies adopting a broad interpretation of Plastic China is the wide range of social issues addressed by Wang. The rationale for implementing the policy was to reduce the growth rate of China's enormous population. The Pengs precarious existence and the fact that they are basically left to fend for themselves is striking for both Chinese and foreign viewers. His descendants inherited his d. 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. 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. Something doesn't add up here. Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images one-child policy, official program initiated in the late 1970s and early '80s by the central government of China, the purpose of which was to limit the great majority of family units in the country to one child each. Chinese lawyer Chen Guangcheng attends a rally to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre June 4, 2019, at the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. 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. Andy Wong/AP 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. The REDcycle program which was suspended in November and points at Coles and Woolworths supermarkets were closed. She is especially protective of him. Image by: Our World in Data. In June 2020, directed remotely by their parents in Italy and a cousin in Canada, the four siblings - then aged between 11 and 16 - traveled from their remote village in Xinjiang all the way to. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Ng Han Guan/AP The success of the first film got Wang invited to California, where he toured recycling plants as part of his next round of research. $2599 ($0.87/Count) Save more with Subscribe & Save. ", 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. Trailer for 'Plastic China' film by director Wang Jiuliang. Her body was giving her all the telltale signs that she was pregnant again. In the last two years, the issue of waste exports to China has attractedconsiderable mediaand public attention. Despite censorship, Wang Jiuliang has managed to reach a wide audience with Plastic China, and have considerable impact. There is something profoundly disturbing in the Wangs purchase of a shiny new sedan car. The documentary is also a meditation on issues of gender inequality. The U.S. used to send a lot of its plastic waste to China to get recycled. In one interview about the film, Wang stated that: China is a country that is facelifted, concealed, faked and unnatural. Image from 'Plastic China' documentary website. 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. 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. This doesn't bode well for our plastic waste problem. 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. 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 . Its river basin comprises one-fifth of the countrys land area, and supports and houses nearly one-third of the population. But starting in 2005, the authorities began enforcing the policy with a renewed ferocity in Linyi. 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. 0000021210 00000 n The whenever is ambiguous, as his 11-year-old daughter Yi Jie tells the camera that hes been promising to send her to school since she was five. Married couples in China in 2016, were allowed to have two children, after concerns over an aging population and shrinking workforce ushered in an end to the country's controversial one-child policy. He was able to fly to the U.S. after weeks of tense negotiation. Her son is part of the last generation of children in China whose births were ruled illegal at the time. "There is no use in trying to make sense of society. "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. Almost certainly, a proportion will have come from the homes, or more specifically the recycling bins, of Australia. "It has been so many years, and I have let the pain go," the mother of three says, eyes downcast. 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. Since the first protest on Nov. 26th, demonstrations popped up in every area of the country. The doctors strangled or drowned those babies.". Posted in Article, Work of Arts. A deliberate shift in consumption will not happen overnight. 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