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. In this rugged hardpan of north China known for poverty and coal, Zhang Yi had but two frail daughters to help scratch out a living. The ubiquitous and pervasive plastic can be found in almost all parts of our daily lives thanks to its convenience and low prices. India News | Latest India News | Read latest and breaking news from India. Since the first protest on Nov. 26th, demonstrations popped up in every area of the country. We promise, no spam! The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children. 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. In the absence of any recognisably subversive content, I would argue that it was the image of China conveyed by Wangs bleak and shocking depiction of the countrys recycling sector that struck a nerve. 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. Officials in her village were actively policing families under the one-child policy. 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. Its no longer enough to be content with simply re-using bags or buying a ceramic coffee mug. China Says It Will Allow Couples to Have 3 Children, Up From 2 The move is the Communist Party's latest attempt to reverse declining birthrates and avert a population crisis, but experts say it. Part of the reason she demurred when first speaking to NPR was because of how dearly her family fought for his birth. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. "It has been so many years, and I have let the pain go," the mother of three says, eyes downcast. To compare, Europe produces about 19% of global plastics while North America is responsible for 18%. The ban was initiated in January of this year and undoubtedly the shockwaves are being felt in the international community as countries look to Asia for another foreign landfill. %PDF-1.4 % ", A mother and a grandmother take care of a child in Beijing on Jan. 1, 2016. Such a context makes it very risky for the latter to adopt a long-term perspective and invest in new equipment or techniques. Yeah, in China you'll meet tons of people who had siblings born while the one-child policy was in effect. 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 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. 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. Boost this article Directors Jiu-liang Wang Genres Documentary Subtitles English [CC] Since taking office as president, Xi Jinping has striven to distinguish his government from the previous one. 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. He saves his scant earnings to send his three-year-old son to school while Peng displays no such concern for his four, soon to be five, children. In sum, China's exercise of power has been more hard than soft. Something doesn't add up here. 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. 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. Global plastic waste generation by country. Beijing seems to be neither "biding its time" nor rising peacefully. 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. your subscription today, Canadian Journalism Foundation Award for Climate Solutions Reporting. This ambitious plan requires the full participation of producers to consumers and is an inspirational idea, though I hadnt even heard of it before digging through plastic research, and it doesnt seem to be very widely discussed. hide caption. of plastic inputs in oceans while putting China at 7%. Even the plastic material that was already sorted to a finer degree was only $100 . 0000022087 00000 n hide caption, "The doctors would inject poison directly into the baby's skull to kill it," Chen says, drawing on recordings he made of interviews with hundreds of women and their families in Linyi. The family, who lives near the city of Kunming in Yunnan province, adopted what . 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. With almost a spooky resemblance to Wildenstein, the Bogdanoff brothers - like her - are still injecting and filling into their seventies. New York CNN Business . "There is no use in trying to make sense of society. What is certain is that the film can serve as a justification for the outright ban on waste importsirrespective of whether Wang ever regarded a ban as the proper solution to the problems he documented in his film. "All we can do is go on living," she says. This is on top of the fact that Chinas population is growing by 0.5% on average annually. 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. 0000002606 00000 n Election. Chen had been persecuted and detained in China after his work advising villagers and speaking out official abuses under the one-child rule. 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. "Officials would kidnap you if you tried to have two 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. It's margarine tubs, clamshells, deli containers. 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%. For some, the pain is still too much to bear. Updated. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Wang is a recognised authority on the topic of waste in 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. 0000010492 00000 n By donating us $100, $50 or subscribe to Boosting $10/month we can get this article and others in front of tens of thousands of specially targeted readers. Garbage collectors called rag and bone men ply the alleys of the cities, pedaling . 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. Yvan Schulz obtained his PhD from the Anthropology Institute, University of Neuchtel in February 2018. This means that people eating fish have also been consuming plastics. 0000017854 00000 n 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. https%3A%2F%2Fearth.org%2Fchina-plastic-pollution%2F. Wangs camera catches heartbreaking images of Jie, the preteen with a collapsing weight of responsibility on her young shoulders. A burning armoured personnel carrier on 4 June 1989, near Tiananmen Square. Alex Wong/Getty Images He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's. NPR isn't using her name to protect her identity because of the trauma she suffered. When his wife became pregnant again, he hoped for a son,. 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 . But Chinas contribution to the global plastic crisis does not end there. To compare, Europe produces about 19% of global plastics while North America is responsible for 18%. The target . Ng Han Guan/AP 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. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. 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. I wanted to find out the origin of the garbage and realized that they were importing waste from the west and other developed countries, even in Asia, like Japan and Korea.. In conclusion, Plastic China constitutes a broad reflexion on social problems and dilemmas in the post-socialist era. The smiles that break across their grubby faces belie a bleak existence for the families that scrape by sorting plastic waste. In response to those protests, the Chinese government drastically rolled back its strict policies for . But even there Johnson found numerous stories of families going to great lengths . He asks Wang Kun, his boss and the owner of the recycling workshop the Pengs work in, for a raise. Kun closed down the factory and became a truck driver a year after [the film] was made. Ng Han Guan/AP He and his wife persevered and had three sons. 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. In the film, the main character, a bright girl named Peng Yijie, does not attend school, although she is already 11 years old. 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. Its massive local plastic production further contributes to Chinas lion share of global greenhouse emissions mainly from coal production. 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. 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. This alters the one-child policy that was introduced in 1978 to control the . 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. 0000017207 00000 n 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. 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. 9 U4W6}-+c\y^xu^`88^iY :\`PrAiSvF5f19/L2Jh206X In other words, though it looks good exteriorly, it has a lot of interior problems (Kanthor 2017). 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. Parents were not penalized for having twins, at least not according to the letter of the law. It has been ten months since China closed its doors to the world's recycling waste. What could the family planning officials have done to her? 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. It was vicious," he says. 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). Her job at a nearby canning factory refuses to hire her full time, she says, because she is a mother of three and needs to leave every afternoon to pick up her son from school. The U.S., Japan and Germany are all at the top of the list when it comes to exporting their used plastic. 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 . He used a pickax to drive them off and was imprisoned for that for half a year. She carried her son to term while hiding in a relative's house. And in May, after a new census showed the birth rate had slowed, China raised the cap to three children. Now, the countrys import ban has pushed some developed countries to find ways to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. 0000001806 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. 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. 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. When the inevitable collapse came, most of the companies went bankrupt, leaving city authorities having to pay to clean up the mess. 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. 0000001315 00000 n ". 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. Kate Sheehy. 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. It was featured in numerous festivals outside China, and has won several awards. What happened to the little girl in plastic China? A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste. However, the film is all too often reduced to its function as a tool for denouncing environmental dumping. The limit in most cases was just one child. 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. Then in 2016, the state allowed two children. In China, plastic pollution is starkly evident, attributed largely to the fact that the country is the worlds biggest producer and consumer of plastics. Trailer for 'Plastic China' film by director Wang Jiuliang. Families of people who died after contracting coronavirus in China's former epicentre Wuhan say they are constantly monitored and warned by authorities, who tell them speaking out will damage . China's decision to abolish its one-child policy offered some relief to couples and to sellers of baby-related goods, but the government hasn't lifted birth limits entirely. 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. 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. 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). Yet the authorities still only allow couples to have three children. 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. 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. But Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, cautions there is no definitive answer. His mother watches him approvingly. Thus, in a way, Wang departs from the perspective of environmental dumping. 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. 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 . 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. Much of the Western worlds waste was once bound for China. While more time is needed to analyse the bans impacts domestically, it has had rippling effects across global plastic pollution and management. According to the census conducted last year, the population is aging and there are fewer young children and working-age people, a major demographic shift that comes with its own economic strains. The Pengs precarious existence and the fact that they are basically left to fend for themselves is striking for both Chinese and foreign viewers. 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. 0000003355 00000 n One ton of unsorted waste was sold to China for about $9. 0000019453 00000 n The state-owned company was recently, named the third-largest single-use plastic waste producer in the world. 0000023972 00000 n Anxious about already strained public education and health care systems, China's leadership is reportedly considering ditching limits entirely. Indeed, they cut across borders and sectors of economic activity. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. 43 0 obj <> endobj xref 43 32 0000000016 00000 n 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? 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 Eight to 14 million tons of plastic waste ends up in oceans every single year, causing great harm to marine life, from accidental ingestion and entanglement, to increasing the risk of invasive species, which can throw entire ecosystems off balance.