For some, the pain is still too much to bear. The U.S. used to send a lot of its plastic waste to China to get recycled. The rest was buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and . That's pushing policymakers to consider raising the official retirement age currently 60 for men and 55 for women for the first time in 40 years. When the ancestral temples were destroyed most families lost the records of their extended family. The . August 4, 2020 1:46pm. Meanwhile, mass urbanization and rural migration have changed the financial and social calculus, making . And in May, after a new census showed the birth rate had slowed, China raised the cap to three children. As research on plastic and its detriments on the environment increasingly pop up on our news feeds, its obvious that weve reached a breaking point. 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. Indeed, they cut across borders and sectors of economic activity. 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. All the issues mentioned above are central to Wangs narrative in Plastic China. 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. 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. 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. The film premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in November 2016, and was shown at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. 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. The doctors strangled or drowned those babies.". Beijing seems to be neither "biding its time" nor rising peacefully. 0000017207 00000 n
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. of mismanaged plastic waste, and is the biggest offender of ocean plastic pollution. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. Such a context makes it very risky for the latter to adopt a long-term perspective and invest in new equipment or techniques. His mother watches him approvingly. In China recycling is done by the trash collectors who specialize in different kinds of refuse rubber, aluminum, tin, plastic, paper and either collect these materials by going house to house or sort through the garbage, selling what they find to traders. 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. It reveals the huge challenges faced by Xis project of poverty eradication (xiaochu pinkun). 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). For instance, Gurao, once Chinas largest bra manufacturing hub, struggles with waste-related pollution of comparable gravity to that of neighbouring Guiyu, the countrys infamous e-waste recycling capital. 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. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, two major sellers of plastic bottles, have made sweeping sustainability commitments. There are clear signs that this space is shrinking nowadays, yet this does not stop many independent filmmakers from pursuing their mission (Berry 2017). Twenty-something Kun is a hard worker with a dream of buying a new car to boost his social status. 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. :v9s];"vE\ j{G=vs=_qq/w?/uynBRBViW)42xP.itM"2HX SJXr/^$,^J_gHIum1$OL@*R*06T4W*[>ypNA-y6J]yPW6VV Today's top India news headlines, news on Indian politics, elections, government, business, technology, and Bollywood. She is especially protective of him. She is especially protective of him. That part of the industry is very sensitive, and if you have nothing to do with them, you cant get in, Wang said. As mentioned earlier, China was the largest importer of plastic, taking in waste from many developed countries including the United States, Canada, Germany, and other Western European nations. What is the current state of plastic pollution in China and how does the country deal with it? siQ6_{#WP(*K9-4GF(NTZ,GI2RV#PF"@(!9BI-$(E^D]ut(nK Jgu")( D)" 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. INVERSE 2023 BDG Media, Inc. All rights reserved. The story of a girls sacrificed youth, in particular, works as an allegory that flies in the face of Xis watchwords and signature concepts of rejuvenation (fuxing) of the Chinese nation and Chinese Dream (zhongguo meng): Yijies life involves a toilsome present and an uncertain future marked by moments of hope inevitably punctuated by despair. After recording only 213 deaths and about 13,000 cases of COVID-19 from January 2020 to early 2022, the city is swamped by the current Omicron wave, which began at the start of the year and has . A familiar margarine packet among the mountains of rubbish in a backyard recycling facility on China. Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. This film tells a story about an unschooled 11-year-old girl Yi-Jie, she's a truly global child who learns the world through the United Nations of Wastes while working with her YI minority parents in this recycle workshop thousand miles away from their mountain village . On average, only about 17% of the plastic used in China is recycled in some shape or form. China had 1 million more births in 2016 than in 2015, following the end of the one-child policy. 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. It followed reports in the Age last month that revealed thousands tonnes of soft. In the 1990s, he says, family planning officials ambushed him in his home at night and beat him with sticks in an effort to convince his wife to abort their third son. 0000003791 00000 n
We all must initiate a seismic cultural shift that sees a serious slowing down of our relentless consumerism. 0000018669 00000 n
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. 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 . Parents were not penalized for having twins, at least not according to the letter of the law. 0000009053 00000 n
"People act in funny ways," she says. 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. China implemented the policy of limiting each family to one child in 1979 to slow the growth of the country's population. 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. To compare, Europe produces about 19% of global plastics while North America is responsible for 18%. Written on 17 January 2019. Some demographers in China argue that instituting birth limits was necessary for keeping birth rates low. No full, official . The terror of such enforcement of birth limits was widespread in Linyi, even if residents were not themselves planning on giving birth. When combined, the plastic pollution situation in China may seem bleak, raising fears of its monumental and possibly irreversible environmental damage and degradation. Get focused newsletters especially designed to be concise and easy to digest. "If you carry it with you all the time, it gets too tiring.". It was vicious," he says. 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. The success of the first film got Wang invited to California, where he toured recycling plants as part of his next round of research. 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). 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. 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. 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. These economic penalties depleted his life savings, a financial impact that compounded over the ensuing years. 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. Chinese parents, who have children born outside the country's one-child policy, protest outside the family planning commission in an attempt to have their fines canceled in Beijing, on Jan. 5, 2016. !(^^\(c-RUFkEE All together, these measures are aligned with the countrys 2060 carbon neutrality targets. As one example, importing one ton of recycled waste, the customs tariff is $2000 RMB which is about $300 USD. 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. 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. However, the films relevance extends far beyond the issue of waste management. 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. The policy permeates through Chinese society in other, sometimes unexpected ways. It is against this backdrop that Plastic China came out in 2016. 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. The . But Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, cautions there is no definitive answer. 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. Its actually incredible that the film, which calls into question the Chinese governments devotion to environmentalism and the welfare of its people, actually made it out of the country. One night in August 2008, the mother made a fateful decision. hide caption. 2014 and Persico 2010) and Zhao Liang (see Sorace 2017), among other leading Chinese independent filmmakers. China boosts electric car fleet for public transport, Support award-winning independent journalism with Up to 60 per cent of Quebecs plastics went to China before its ban; Halifax is reportedly sending three hundred tonnes of plastic to landfill, and Calgary is sitting on five thousand tonnes of plastic waste, with all of that having gone to China in the past. The target . Its massive local plastic production further contributes to Chinas lion share of global greenhouse emissions mainly from coal production.
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