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An Australian paper company called Pratt Industries built a paper mill in Ohio to take. His focus on the daily life of two families in a shared domestic space, where exploitation unfolds in an intimate setting, allows him to give an otherwise commonplace phenomenon a particularly raw and emotional dimension. hide caption. to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. A burning armoured personnel carrier on 4 June 1989, near Tiananmen Square. "There is no point in controlling them. The people who had a stake in it did not welcome the shooting.. 0000023031 00000 n Katherine Martinko is a writer and expert in sustainable living. 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 ! Wang recalled. 0000003242 00000 n Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and . 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 ubiquitous and pervasive plastic can be found in almost all parts of our daily lives thanks to its convenience and low prices. Mao's attempts to remove the family from the center of Chinese life ultimately failed, but not before destroying a few aspects of traditional culture. The news hit hard in the United States, which is home to about 60,000 children adopted from China, mostly girls. 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. But starting in 2005, the authorities began enforcing the policy with a renewed ferocity in Linyi. 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). There are two younger boys, Liu Zhuang, 5 and Liu Jian, 4, as well as newly born twin sisters. 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. In the cinema version of Plastic China, the concept of labour exploitation applies more clearly within China and even among former peasants than it does between China and the highly industrialised countries from which waste is imported. 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. hide caption, "I had already had two children but my heart just did not feel right," says the woman, now in her 50s, who works part time in a canning factory. Despite this, plastic waste continues to soar partly due to the relatively low cost of plastic bags shoppers are therefore not deterred to pay for one and the rapid rise of e-commerce, and delivery services, resulting in mounting plastic packaging. Then in 2016, the state allowed two children. At that point, it was already the world's most populous country. In August 2014, the little girl was able to go to school and she is in third grade now. Its mostly a monotonous existence, consisting largely of wading through imported plastic and trash, and melting it in small industrial vats. Until there is a. Products. 0000017854 00000 n ", A mother and a grandmother take care of a child in Beijing on Jan. 1, 2016. Even if I had to go to prison and endure beatings, in the end, these children were able to survive. Either the government is already losing faith in the reality of its implementation, or it needs a bigger budget for advertising. 0000009053 00000 n But even there Johnson found numerous stories of families going to great lengths . On average, only about. 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. Indeed, they cut across borders and sectors of economic activity. Please help us make our goal! 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. 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. 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. The British colony simply. A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste. 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 '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. It has been slow to completely dismantle its massive family planning bureaucracy built up over the past four decades. The terror of such enforcement of birth limits was widespread in Linyi, even if residents were not themselves planning on giving birth. 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. With Plastic China, Wang aimed to raise awareness of his homelands role in the global waste trade, and expose its negative repercussions on the Chinese population and environment. What is the current state of plastic pollution in China and how does the country deal with it? HdU{PSW? Image by: Our World in Data. Director Jiu-Liang Wang refers to PLASTIC CHINA as a title which riffs on the idea of plastic surgerya way of masking the underlying physical truth of any given situation. Election. This has lead to a major shift in China, family is now seen as the 3 living generations . ", 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. hide caption. Posted in Article, Work of Arts. 0000039672 00000 n To compare, Europe produces about 19% of global plastics while North America is responsible for 18%. The detailed roadmap includes measures to phase out single-use plastics and targets for cutting plastic production, reduce plastic waste destined for landfills, and boost recycling efforts (with specific targets like 85% of agricultural plastic film to be recycled). There is one obvious, clear, imperative measure that we all must make a priority- we must reduce the amount of plastics we use every day. Now, the countrys import ban has pushed some developed countries to find ways to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste. hb```"qVta1 FsD 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 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. A deliberate shift in consumption will not happen overnight. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. Made in China publications are open access and always available as a free download. Ng Han Guan/AP 0000010125 00000 n Officials in her village were actively policing families under the one-child policy. Plastic pollution has long plagued China, along with severe air pollution. To the US and other developed countries, that's a lot less trouble to export waste to China. Another monumental step China has taken to combat plastic pollution is its ban on recycling plastic imports in 2018. They did not officially register the last two to avoid paying a fine, but the father says he still paid a bribe to family planning officials to avoid further harassment. First of all his film tackles the problem of labour exploitation. Twenty-something Kun is a hard worker with a dream of buying a new car to boost his social status. That same year, he expressed his intention to undertake a follow-up project on waste imports beyond plastics, which he tentatively titled Dumping Ground of the World (shijie de laji chang) (Liu 2014). One ton of unsorted waste was sold to China for about $9. Back in the 1960s, more than 100 children - mostly abandoned, mostly babies and mostly girls - were brought over from Hong Kong to be adopted by British families. An Arkansas man who received one of the mysterious seed packages sent to thousands of US residents from China planted them on his property and said . That's pushing policymakers to consider raising the official retirement age currently 60 for men and 55 for women for the first time in 40 years. Her son is part of the last generation of children in China whose births were ruled illegal at the time. The aspect of the film that most stuck with me personally was how Plastic China depicted the poor standard of waste management in rural China. In March 2018, China's environment minister at the time, Li Ganjie, noted that China used to import around 4 to 4.5 million tons of solid, unrecyclable trash. She wants to start preparing for her son's marriage a costly endeavor as rural families expect the husband to provide a material guarantee for any future wife. siQ6_{#WP(*K9-4GF(NTZ,GI2RV#PF"@(!9BI-$(E^D]ut(nK Jgu")( D)" 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. Single's Day, China's biggest online shopping holiday akin to Black Friday in the U.S. is a recognition of the many bachelors who are unable to find partners in a gender-skewed society. The man wants to remain unnamed because he believes he could be harassed again for speaking of that time. This alters the one-child policy that was introduced in 1978 to control the . Wangs camera catches heartbreaking images of Jie, the preteen with a collapsing weight of responsibility on her young shoulders. Much of the Western worlds waste was once bound for China. That part of the industry is very sensitive, and if you have nothing to do with them, you cant get in, Wang said. Editor's note: This story contains descriptions that may be disturbing. The doctors strangled or drowned those babies.". 0000035786 00000 n Much of the Western worlds waste was once bound for China. 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. 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 . Plastic China (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ) is a 2016 Chinese documentary film depicting the lives of two families who make their living recycling plastic waste imported from developed countries. This doesn't bode well for our plastic waste problem. A familiar margarine packet among the mountains of rubbish in a backyard recycling facility on China. He used a pickax to drive them off and was imprisoned for that for half a year. Immediately afterwards, he embarked on a new project. 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. 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. hide caption. India News | Latest India News | Read latest and breaking news from India. Second, this prevents us from understanding why the film was censored in China, when the denunciation of waste imports actually fits with the Chinese states increasingly restrictive policies on this issue since the 2010s. 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. Fish makes up the majority of diets for many people in China. 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. By the container load, the cast-off plastic comes from Korea, Europe and the US. 0000021210 00000 n "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. Summaries. For some, the pain is still too much to bear. "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. 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 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). The limit in most cases was just one child. "I really feel happy. But Kunwho is Han, from Shandong province, and can read and writerefuses, telling Wenyuan that he can always leave if he is not satisfied. 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. 04:22. The insane volume of sorted scraps are pushed through a machine that turns the plastic into a gross, grey sludge before it is transformed into small grey pellets. 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. "Women have it all figured out now they won't have more kids even when they're told to have more!" His mother watches him approvingly. 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 . 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. N ``, a mother and a grandmother take care of a child Beijing. China publications are open access and always available as a free download her village were actively families. The ubiquitous and pervasive plastic can be found in almost all parts of our daily lives thanks its. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China world & # x27 s... 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