what happened to the families in plastic china

0000009053 00000 n The rationale for implementing the policy was to reduce the growth rate of China's enormous population. Chen, the lawyer, mounted a class action lawsuit on behalf of Linyi's women. When the ancestral temples were destroyed most families lost the records of their extended family. In another one, he explained, in reference to the films title that: The [word] plastic here has two meanings: first it refers to the plastic waste, but at a deeper level it refers to the weakness beneath our surface prosperity;the way plastic surgery only improves appearance, not the reality. 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. 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. your subscription today, Canadian Journalism Foundation Award for Climate Solutions Reporting. Another factor that justifies adopting a broad interpretation of Plastic China is the wide range of social issues addressed by Wang. 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 . What could the family planning officials have done to her? On January 1, 2019, a ban on plastic straws in restaurants and other service businesses began in Washington, D.C. Read on for the reasons . 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. 0000003466 00000 n But even there Johnson found numerous stories of families going to great lengths . "That requires buying them a car, an apartment. In connection with this, the film represents a reflection on the legal status and living conditions of Chinas floating population (liudong renkou). "If you only work behind the doors with government officials, going to places and reading documents arranged by them, you will be easily fooled," said Zhang, who said his father died in February 2020 after going into a hospital for a . Ng Han Guan/AP Viewers learn that this has to do with her status as a migrant, her familys meagre earnings, and her fathers alcoholism. 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. 43 0 obj <> endobj xref 43 32 0000000016 00000 n 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. India News | Latest India News | Read latest and breaking news from India. 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 . For some, the pain is still too much to bear. China used to take much of it, but has banned imports of plastic waste so where does it now go? 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. 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. If we do nothing and continue to turn our beautiful world into a Wall-E-esque nightmare, then the fate of our civilization will be suicide by garbage. Anxious about already strained public education and health care systems, China's leadership is reportedly considering ditching limits entirely. A Chinese family has been forced to give up their pet dog after realizing they had actually adopted a black bear. During the reform era, this has prevented them from enjoying key rights and public services in their place of residence. 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. She wanted to avoid the "family planning officials" in her home village, just outside Linyi, a city of 11 million in China's northern Shandong province, where the policy's enforcement was especially violent. It now collects its community's plastic trash and turns it into fuel. 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. (Liu 2014). Beijing seems to be neither "biding its time" nor rising peacefully. CNN . Image by: Our World in Data. "Other doctors would artificially induce labor. 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. Answer (1 of 4): 0Many of them lived peacefully as commoners, while many of them were unfortunately slaughtered. 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. 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. !(^^\(c-RUFkEE 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. 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. The people who had a stake in it did not welcome the shooting.. Twenty-something Kun is a hard worker with a dream of buying a new car to boost his social status. Its mostly a monotonous existence, consisting largely of wading through imported plastic and trash, and melting it in small industrial vats. 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. Ran Zheng for NPR 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. 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 . You need an active subscription to post a comment. To compare, Europe produces about 19% of global plastics while North America is responsible for 18%. August 4, 2020 1:46pm. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. The British colony simply. Not only does the country consume at least one fifth of the worlds plastics, 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. 2014 and Persico 2010) and Zhao Liang (see Sorace 2017), among other leading Chinese independent filmmakers. An old friend of hers, the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, knows full well what she and tens of thousands of other women in Linyi city went through. In March 2018, China's environment minister at the time, Li Ganjie, noted that China used to import around 4 to 4.5 million tons of solid, unrecyclable trash. 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. "This was not your average level of policy enforcement. The picture of Chinas gender regime that emerges from Plastic China is one of entrenched patriarchy, at least in the countryside, where boys are still valued more than girls (zhongnan qingn). 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. Meanwhile, mass urbanization and rural migration have changed the financial and social calculus, making . Plastic China: Directed by Jiuliang Wang. 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. Now, the countrys import ban has pushed some developed countries to find ways to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. 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. 0000001943 00000 n Much like The Swan, a show that ran concurrently . 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. If you were hiding and they could not find you, they would kidnap your elder relatives and make them stand in cold water, in the winter," remembers Lu Bilun, a resident. But there was tension amid the squalor, as the plant manager and his one employee clashed over the education and ambition of the employees 11-year-old daughter. 0000017854 00000 n 0000019453 00000 n The news hit hard in the United States, which is home to about 60,000 children adopted from China, mostly girls. Andy Wong/AP 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. 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. For decades, China has relied on superficial policies targeting plastic to reduce waste in the country. 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. This doesn't bode well for our plastic waste problem. By the container load, the cast-off plastic comes from Korea, Europe and the US. 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. The U.S. used to send a lot of its plastic waste to China to get recycled. Something doesn't add up here. It was announced in late 2015 that the program was to end in early 2016. China implemented the policy of limiting each family to one child in 1979 to slow the growth of the country's population. There are two younger boys, Liu Zhuang, 5 and Liu Jian, 4, as well as newly born twin sisters. Today, he lives in Maryland with his family. 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. He came to the throne in 1908 at two-years-old and ruled until February 1912, when he was forced to abdicate. Yi-Jie is an 11-year-old girl who works and lives at a plastics recycling facility in the documentary "Plastic China." The plastics recycling industry had a high-profile spotlight in late January . 0000022087 00000 n 0000018669 00000 n He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's. On Jan. 1, China enacted new legislation allowing all married couples to have two children. of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution. 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. 0000021210 00000 n Along the belt, human workers pick and channel what is valuable (bottles, cardboard, aluminium cans) into sorting chutes. 03:15. 0000035823 00000 n to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. He and his wife persevered and had three sons. 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. trailer <<4243014C4E284DEB98C83941C307E81B>]/Prev 529831>> startxref 0 %%EOF 74 0 obj <>stream 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. However, the films relevance extends far beyond the issue of waste management. 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. The best parallel to it for Americans is to think of it like marijuana laws. When his wife became pregnant again, he hoped for a son,. The doctors strangled or drowned those babies.". One night in August 2008, the mother made a fateful decision. Ontario. It's margarine tubs, clamshells, deli containers. His descendants inherited his d. Moreover, Plastic China contains virtually no direct criticism of any government, state-owned enterprise, or other powerful entitya key difference with Under the Dome (qiong ding zhi xia 2015), another documentary on Chinas environmental predicament that also went viral and disappeared from the Internet in a matter of days. It is very clear that the families are living in unregulated, shockingly toxic environments generating severe impacts on the outside world; throughout the film we see such a staggering amount of garbage that a shot of sheep and a patch of plastic-strewn grass seems oddly out-of-place. A recent book helps explain how PRC leaders think about the . But starting in 2005, the authorities began enforcing the policy with a renewed ferocity in Linyi. 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. Despite censorship, Wang Jiuliang has managed to reach a wide audience with Plastic China, and have considerable impact. 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. All the issues mentioned above are central to Wangs narrative in Plastic China. 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. 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. China has been taking US plastic waste for three decades. I came across many such sites while conducting research in semi-industrialised villages and small towns in Guangdong province in the mid-2010s. Experts warn of an increase in illegal dumping and incineration of plastics as prices for plastic scraps plummet in the wake of Chinas exit from the market it dominated. At that point, it was already the world's most populous country. , when he was forced to give up their pet dog after realizing they had actually adopted a black.. To find ways to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste problem Wangs narrative in plastic China with! Jian, 4, as well as newly born twin sisters, Europe about! 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