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. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. Instead of numbing us with facts like how China has contaminated over 80 per cent of its fresh water through landfills and processing, he gets us to feel bad for Kun, Peng and their kids; if we identified with their plight, perhaps we wouldnt want to send so much trash for them to sort through. "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 . 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). The U.S., Japan and Germany are all at the top of the list when it comes to exporting their used plastic. Once again, though, Wang has a holistic way of tackling the issue, and his real concern is Chinas changing relationship to the land under capitalisma broad project if there ever was one. But Chinas contribution to the global plastic crisis does not end there. "Women have it all figured out now they won't have more kids even when they're told to have more!" Twenty years later, the volume of. 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. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images Yvan Schulz obtained his PhD from the Anthropology Institute, University of Neuchtel in February 2018. 0000010125 00000 n 0000023972 00000 n 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. Such a context makes it very risky for the latter to adopt a long-term perspective and invest in new equipment or techniques. 0000009529 00000 n She babysits, cooks, works and teaches her three younger siblings while her parents do the same back-breaking work day in and day out. ", 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. "There was also rapid urbanization, economic growth, industrialization, female emancipation and more female labor force participation. 03:15. Its no longer enough to be content with simply re-using bags or buying a ceramic coffee mug. 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. In connection with this, the film represents a reflection on the legal status and living conditions of Chinas floating population (liudong renkou). 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. 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. Much like The Swan, a show that ran concurrently . On July 16 that year, as Beijing was gearing up to hold the Summer Olympics, Zhang flagged the sudden increase of infant cases to his hospital's dean, who then reported them to the local health. 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. 04:22. Since taking office as president, Xi Jinping has striven to distinguish his government from the previous one. 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. "The one-child policy was not the only thing that happened in China in the 1980s and 1990s," Gietel-Basten says. They dont know how the United States really is, because all they have received is information from Chinese TV, which is made by the Ministry of Media, Wang said. First of all his film tackles the problem of labour exploitation. The . 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. Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. That was a period where China's growth started booming. 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. {&L Q4t)o('aJ. In the film, Peng Wenyuanwho comes from Sichuan province, belongs to the Yi ethnic group, and is almost illiteratecomplains repeatedly about his salary. Anxious about already strained public education and health care systems, China's leadership is reportedly considering ditching limits entirely. 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. Something doesn't add up here. She is especially protective of him. Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. 0000016680 00000 n Acquiring this potent status symbol allows them to have the feelingand give others the impressionthat they have achieved wealth, and moved up the social ladder. The people who had a stake in it did not welcome the shooting.. :v9s];"vE\ j{G=vs=_qq/w?/uynBRBViW)42xP.itM"2HX SJXr/^$,^J_gHIum1$OL@*R*06T4W*[>ypNA-y6J]yPW6VV However, implementation of this reform only begun several years into the shooting of Plastic China (which lasted from 2011 to 2016), and remains patchy to this day. "There is no point in controlling them. In one interview about the film, Wang stated that: China is a country that is facelifted, concealed, faked and unnatural. The country once imported nearly half of the planet's plastic recyclables. The global plastic pollution crisis continues to worsen every year. In this sense, Plastic China has arguably played a key role in the recent evolution of the trade in recyclable waste. 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. 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. There are clear signs that this space is shrinking nowadays, yet this does not stop many independent filmmakers from pursuing their mission (Berry 2017). The film also resonated with the study of Chinas so-called informal recycling world that I conducted in the mid-2010s (Schulz 2018). 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. Last October, Jian Feng, a man reportedly from northern China, sued and divorced his wife after she had a daughter who was "incredibly ugly" and did not resemble either parent. 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 "Officials would kidnap you if you tried to have two children. This means that people eating fish have also been consuming plastics. Plastic China: Directed by Jiuliang Wang. 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. For years, even social scientists have supported a widely held belief that Chinese . An important implication is that improving the lives of the people who live in rural recycling hubs and engage in waste sorting and processing requires more than putting an end to waste importsespecially if imports are substituted with domestic waste, of which there is no shortage in China. 0000010492 00000 n 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.. 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. The state-owned company was recently named the third-largest single-use plastic waste producer in the world, where in 2019, it reportedly churned out about 5.3 million tonnes of plastics. Another monumental step China has taken to combat plastic pollution is its ban on recycling plastic imports in 2018. The U.S. used to send a lot of its plastic waste to China to get recycled. In sum, China's exercise of power has been more hard than soft. The . Almost certainly, a proportion will have come from the homes, or more specifically the recycling bins, of Australia. This also explains why Wang Kuns plastic recycling workshop, like many others, relies on manual labour and a couple of unsophisticated and antiquated machines. Jan. 1 marked a significant cultural shift in China starting this year, families will be able to have two children. Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children. 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. 2014 and Persico 2010) and Zhao Liang (see Sorace 2017), among other leading Chinese independent filmmakers. They must be in middle school or high school by now.". Her son is part of the last generation of children in China whose births were ruled illegal at the time. 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. 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. Additionally, China currently tops the list of biggest greenhouse gas emitters though the US overtakes it for emissions per capita. He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's. "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. 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. 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. Han Dynasty Emperor Xian of Han, the last emperor of Han dynasty died as a duke.
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