Plastic China

Curiously this is an uplifting doc with almost no political message. Because the people are shown going about their daily lives we come to feel we know them, and indeed their hopes and dreams and the way they live with one another is very much like people everywhere (Source: DennisLittrell 2017, np link).

The film focuses on an unschooled 11-year-old girl [called Yi Jie, whose] … (Source: Liebman 2018a, np link).

… uneducated parents … sort and recycle plastic waste (Source: Anon 2025c, np link).

Viewers learn that … [this] bright girl … does not attend school, although she is already 11 years old [because of] her status as a migrant, her family’s meagre earnings, and her father’s alcoholism. However, it is also strongly implied that [her] gender played a role in her parents’ decision to neglect her education. At some point, [her dad’s boss] Wang Kun pushes for [Yi Jie] to attend a local kindergarten, even offering to cover the costs, yet [Yi Jie’s] father, Peng Wenyuan, refuses, preferring that she continue to sort plastics, do household chores, and take care of her younger siblings. This contrasts with the situation of Wang Qiqi, Kun’s 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 Beijing (Source: Schulz 2019, np link).

[The] film tackles the problem of labour exploitation. The prosperity of China’s coastal regions relies on a massive inflow of migrant workers from the interior, who rarely have much bargaining power regarding their working conditions (Source: Schulz 2019, np link).

Pathetically poor peasants process plastics, pre-pubescents play pitifully.  Peng’s a real dumbfu^k hothead drunk. Shi££y work that appears to be structurally necessary. A good education is no guarantee you can avoid this, where maybe just the most irresponsible dumbfu^ks end up. Awful plastic smoke everywhere. Tumors. Birth apparently without use of the hospital. Pretty bleak material (Source: Kordle 2020, np link).

Peng Wenjaun – who comes from Sichuan province, belongs to the Yi ethnic group, and is almost illiterate -complains repeatedly about his salary. He asks Wang Kun, his boss and the owner of the recycling workshop the Pengs work in, for a raise. But Kun – who is Han, from Shandong province, and can read and write – refuses, telling Wenyuan that he can always leave if he is not satisfied (Source: Schulz 2019, np link).

Peng had promised to send [Yi Jie] to school five years earlier but not yet delivered (Source: Anon 2018a, np link).

Yi Jie was not going to school when Mr. Wang started to film, because her father said he did not want to pay the fees (Source: Zhao 2017, np).

[Yi Jies] father promised he would send her to school when he had earned enough money, but four years on he has not done so (Source: Li 2015, np).

However, Yi-Jie keeps her wish alive of going to school one day, and we see her holding her playful campaign towards learning and schooling (Source: Anon 2018a, np link).

[She] made a fake computer out of plastic waste, and the ‘screen’ was an advertisement for a Japanese weight-loss drug (Source: Wang in Li 2015, np).

Will [Yi Jie] succeed to sit in a classroom and learn? Or will she succeed her parents as an illiterate laborer in the recycling workshop (Source: Anon 2018a, np link)?

Rudimentary practices are revealed in the recycling plant. In more than one scene, workers use a lighter and their sense of smell to identify and sort plastics. And the effect of the recycling industry on the surrounding community is clearly shown (Source: Kanthor 2017, np link).

However, the documentary … is not directly concerned with the plastic recycling industry itself and the possible ecological consequences it may have on the environment. These are already visible in the corner of each shot, in the dead fish that the children discover as they explore the world around them and in the plastic nature that fills the horizon from end to end. Instead, the director chooses to focus on a small group of people, to follow their daily lives, to explore their dreams and ambitions and, ultimately, to determine whether behind the plastic curtain there is a possibility of escape or at least a better future (Source: Dimitris Dx 2017, np link).

The contemporary condition in China is that this is consistent with director [Wang’s] intention. In one interview about the film, Wang stated that: ‘China is a country that is facelifted, concealed, faked and unnatural. In other words, though it looks good exteriorly, it has a lot of interior problems’ […..] In another one, he [Wang] explained, in reference to the film’s 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. Years of rapid growth have made China appear prosperous, but pollution is having a huge impact on health … while China’s growth appears incredible, it is actually cheap and fragile’ (Source: Schulz 2019, np link). 

[This is a]n interesting case study of China’s 2000s to 2010s middle-class Zeitgeist of aspiring to upward social mobility, and patriarchal regimes of development. It effectively visualises its own criticisms of ecological paternalism, and manages to communicate the stories of its characters empathetically without engaging in gratuitous amounts of poverty porn like others in its particular sub-genre of ecocinema. Props also to showcasing plastic pollution without accidentally aestheticising it – a difficult thing to do these days, apparently (Source: Hamza 2024, np link).

This movie does show you the result of too much plastic being brought to China. This movie teaches you to be happy for what you have and to watch what you throw away because it may end up in a child’s hand (Source: toriamiddleton 2019, np link).

It is beyond my imagination and keeps me rethink the recycling industry because it can transfer the damage to other countries to recycle and claim that the product is environmentally friendly without seeing the actual recycle process. But at the same time it is also an industry depend on wastes and it is on which people live. This documentary really raised a dilemma: How could we make the protagonists’ life better? Should we cut down this kind of industry? However as the Kun said: “I don’t have other skills. I do it for living.” then, should we produce more wastes? Do they have to live like this (Source: leewinglum 2018, np link)?

The director and cinematographer of Plastic China, Jiu-Liang Wang, made the film in part to influence waste exporting countries to take responsibility for their own garbage (Source: Liebman 2018b, np link).

Plastic China is generally invoked, both within and outside of China, in connection with the global capitalist system that, for many years at least, allowed relatively rich countries to pass the burden of pollution on to China (Source: Schulz 2019, np link).

Born a peasant’s son in a village in China’s eastern Shandong Province, [filmmaker] Mr. Wang sold cellphones and vegetables to save for college, finally making it to the Communication University of China in Beijing, at 26, to study photography (Source: Zhao 2017, np).

But Wang’s odyssey into China’s waste challenges was not intentional. After graduating from Communication University of China in 2006, he worked as a photographer, producing what he said was ‘art for art’s sake’. The turning point came in 2008 – the year Beijing hosted the Olympic Games – when he began to notice the city’s growing waste problem. Between 2008 and 2011, Wang tracked down more than 460 rubbish dumps around the capital, and spoke to the army of scavengers who made their living recycling foreign waste. Wang said the discovery was shocking and drove him to begin his environmental mission (Source: Rui 2020, np).

I started to go around on my motorcycle … looking all around the outskirts of Beijing. And this took me to the first … gigantic waste dump. That facility is only … six kilometers from my home. It was absolutely shocking. First, how huge it was. It was frightening. It seemed so apocalyptic … I don’t see myself as simply…a documentary director. I’m more like…a sort of social worker, or a citizen journalist (Source: Wang in World Magazine video 2018, np link).

Wang is a recognised authority on the topic of waste in China. He rose to prominence a few years ago thanks to his first film, Beijing Besieged by Waste, which revealed the existence of a great number of unauthorised and unmonitored dumpsites around Beijing. 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 … Wang aimed to raise awareness of his homeland’s role in the global waste trade, and expose its negative repercussions on the Chinese population and environment. In 2014, Wang released an early, less narrative but more explanatory version of his documentary addressed at the media, in which he clearly frames the issue as environmental dumping. 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). It is therefore not surprising that Plastic China is generally invoked, both within and outside of China, in connection with the global capitalist system that, for many years at least, allowed relatively rich countries to pass the burden of pollution on to China (Source: Schulz 2019, np link).

First I wanted to have an investigation and tell people the facts about waste recycling. People didn’t recognize the problem, and though many NGOs and media were merely talking about the benefits of recycling, instead of making an easy judgment, I wanted to make people to reach more comprehensive information. The more information they have, the more accurate an understanding they would have and a more accurate evaluation they could make. In fact, not only the Chinese were ignorant, but even most American people had no idea of where these plastic wastes were going. Afterwards, when I e-mailed my colleagues in Sweden, Denmark and Spain, they were very surprised as well. A Norwegian NGO was undertaking an investigation and they used my materials. They told me that in Norway, 99% people didn’t know about the truth of this issue. You know that the environmental protection has been always good in Scandinavian countries, people have environmental awareness, emphasizing sorting and recycling, and utilization of waste, but most people there didn’t know that their waste went to China (Source: Wang in Yang 2017, p.4).

[S]ix years’ work went into finding and documenting what happens to imported plastic waste. The discovery shocked Mr. Wang. Thousands of family-run factories operate in the open air shredding the waste plastic into small particles to sell to factories in southern China, which then make them into new plastic goods. The air and nearby rivers are heavily polluted, he found (Source: Zhao 2017, np).

In Daxing District, ‘Beijing’s vegetable basket’, [he] saw a vegetable greenhouse covered with plastic film next to the garbage dump, and the water for irrigation was less than 10 meters away from the garbage dump. In a lotus pond in the suburbs of Beijing, there was an unprotected garbage dump next to it, and the leachate from the garbage and the sewage brought by rain and snow flowed directly into the lotus pond (Source Xinqi 2017, np link).

Workers sifting through the waste with their bare hands are often pricked by used needles … For one and a half years, he lived in a rented place near the two families he filmed, in a small town largely dependent on recycling imported plastic waste in Shandong, his home province. He hung out with the families every day, eating together and sometimes helping them with the work. The final product was ‘Plastic China,’ an 81-minute film featuring the two families, and a 26-minute version that explains the industry itself and every character in its chain, like waste suppliers in the United States and Europe and Chinese workers who make their living from the trade (Source: Zhao 2017, np).

Wang Jiuliang cut two versions of ‘Plastic Kingdom’ [Plastic China] from more than 300 hours of shooting material. One is the 82-minute film version … and the other is the 28-minute media version that is not publicly screened. The latter is more like an in-depth investigative report on this industry (Source Xinqi 2017, np link).

The 26-minute version of the [Plastic China] film, which debuted on Chinese streaming sites in 2014, currently has a 9.5/10 on Chinese media review site Douban (Source: Global Times 2017, np).

At the beginning of the film’s online media cut, filmmaker Jiuliang Wang asks the director of a recycling centre in California why plastics are being shipped to China: ‘The markets are just too good coming from China.’ Wang asks further, ‘Do you know how your Chinese buyers process your plastics?’ to which the director hesitantly replies, ‘The conditions are not ideal’ (Source: Liebman 2018a, np link).

[This] short version … attracted a lot of interest … In a video posted in 2014 on Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV’s website, Wang described why he made the film. ‘Your goal is to make money, but what is the ultimate purpose of making money?’ he said. ‘When you made money and your life quality was indeed improved, you lost health and life. Then, what is the meaning of making money? [Wang Speaking] “Although you made a lot of money, is it worth it when your family lives in an environment like this?” he said. “Thus, I named this film ‘Plastic China.’ China is a country that is facelifted, concealed, faked and unnatural. In other words, though it looks good exteriorly, it has a lot of interior problems” (Source: Kanthor 2017, np link).

In 2017, Plastic China premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, quickly gaining critical acclaim (Source: Liebman 2018a, np link).

In Plastic China, Wang went further and deeper in connecting the dots – from a household waste factory in Berkeley, California to the little girl working as a waste recycler in Shandong (Source: Rui 2020, np).

Plastic China constitutes a broad reflexion on social problems and dilemmas in the post-socialist era. The film clearly belongs to China’s ‘new documentary movement’, which has created an important space for social commentary and critique since the early 1990s (Source: Schulz 2019, np link).

The film doesn’t cast judgments at the characters, and it spares direct judgment of the authorities as well, both local and national. ‘Chairman Mao,’ as he is referred to in the film, is neither celebrated nor criticized, though the children in the factory clearly have no idea who he is (Source: Logan 2020, np link).

[The film] does not seek to criticize specific groups of people, said Ruby Chen, one of the film’s producers. Rather, she said, everyone should reflect on their own roles in the trade after watching how the two families live (Source: Zhao 2017, np).

I liked how there wasn’t really any involvement of the camera man – more of an observational approach (Source: lydiakurtulus 2024, np link).

Wang does use visual irony to softly critique issues like inequality within Chinese society, global inequality, and the lack of regulation in China. Presumably this is the only way he, a Chinese filmmaker, can get in even the subtlest of critiques of China and its government. Clearly, however soft the critiques are, this film is meant as a wake-up call to both the Chinese Communist Party and to the international community. Simply recycling isn’t enough, the film seems to implore (Source: Logan 2020, np link).

There is considerable overlap between Wang’s 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. Moreover, Plastic China contains virtually no direct criticism of any government, state-owned enterprise, or other powerful entity—a key difference with Under the Dome (qiong ding zhi xia 2015), another documentary on China’s environmental predicament that also went viral and disappeared from the Internet in a matter of days (Source: Schulz 2019, np link).

Some movies can stand in as teachers, as they present material with facts, figures, and helpful context that students can use to access a new top­ic. Plastic China is not that sort of film. Instead, it would serve as an excel­lent conversation starter or case study about the problems of globalization; challenges presented by rapid growth in China; the role of government safety regulations; the impact of the large-scale displacement of families due to large-scale rural-to-urban migration in China; the role of education in developing countries, particularly for girls; and the complicated nature of the recycling supply chain. In fact, it’s one of the most widely applicable films I’ve seen in terms of the variety of issues it could be used to address (Source: Logan 2020, np link).

All the surreal moments in the real world are extraordinary and brutal (Source: 🦉 2017, np link).

I rlly needed to pee watching this (Source: Luca 🤌🏻 2025, np link).

Damn capitalism, life is so wasteful (Source: @wendaoliu9447 2020, np link).

fu@k Communist Party of China (Source: Anon 2023, np link)!

This is the evil of the system (Source: @gigm7956 2021, np link).

This is immoral and shameful (Source: @ainagapicaporte4361 2021, np link).

It’s really sad (Source: @Líng bō wēi bù 2020, np link).

[It’s] tough to see (Source: smartypantsz 2020, np link).

Seeing the other side of China’s glamorous life makes me feel cold (Source: @jianmei2083 2023, np link).?

Incredible and heartbreaking movie (Source: Jash 2023, np link).

I really can’t bear to watch it, it’s too painful (Source: @ruyi7473 2021, np link)!

Yeah, it’s a documentary, but it says more about us as humans. It’s more of an artistic exposition of what we are becoming. And with the utmost respect for the humans here, we need to be better at it. Save the earth and we save ourselves (Source: EggOrChicken 2019, np link).

The spirit of Yi-Jie is something else, the resilience of all involved and the love they have for their families is beyond me. Documentaries like this remind me what a weak willed human being I am (Source: JimMearns 2022, np link).

To watch these families ‘exist’ in their world – especially the eldest daughter – is hard to watch, but this is a must see film, just to see how the ‘other half’ lives. We live our lives, using things and throwing them away. These people are on the exact opposite of our actions (Source: smartypantsz 2020, np link).

Damnnnn the families living life hard af. Always remember at the end of your stressful day, someone somewhere in china is living their lives like this (Source: NizamOmar 2025, np link).

This is so real. I’m watching it while eating my toast with nutella 🤣 Environmental damage, their medical expenses for cancer etc, losses will be far greater than the gains from these rubbish (Source: @Somelazyoldman 2022, np link).

yi jie would be about 19 now which is only a few years younger than me. i really hope she’s okay 🙁  (Source: george ˚ʚ♡ɞ˚ 2024, np link).

It hurts my heart to see this, so we in China must become more prosperous and strong, so that our descendants will no longer have such a situation (Source: @Tim2023-k5d 2019, np link)!

I was one of these kids (Source: @fisheyeroll 2024, np link).

In southern Zhejiang, I remember it was really like this when I was a kid. Many people were engaged in the plastic bag business, but later on, due to strict crackdowns, the number of people doing this decreased a lot, but they didn’t disappear. I don’t know where they went (Source: @sherkjlsjdf6334 2019, np link).

[They w]ent to a more remote mountainous area (Source: @wendyxu-v2l 2024, np link).

Those who import foreign garbage should go to hell … These people are short-sighted and only see the small money in front of them. They are taking the environment for generations to come in exchange for a few more dollars in their pockets. What a huge price to pay. Why are Chinese people so stupid (Source: @Líng bō wēi bù 2020, np link)?

This is not because of stupidity, but because we Chinese are too smart and too selfish. The profits from plastic waste are so huge that the environment is no longer important. When you have money, you can’t go there if there is pollution here (Source: @MerdanYakefu 2020, np link).

In the process of rapid economic development, the group of people in the film are the ‘sacrificed’ people. my country has begun to seriously manage the import of solid waste. I hope that government departments will always be highly responsible, especially local governments, and regard the interests of the people as the highest priority (Source: @Zhāngshìqí-y2x 2021, np link).

These are the garbage that China was forced to purchase by the WTO. Please pay attention to the news and don’t criticize it. China has already begun to impose comprehensive restrictions on these highly polluting foreign garbage in 2017, and the United States is still opposing China’s restrictions. Why don’t you say that the United States is sinister (Source: @nickeliang2470 2021, np link)?

The problem of plastic waste should not be exported to China or any other country. We need to have a law that prevents plastic, electronic waste etc. from being shipped out of our own countries. There is no reason why we cannot sort, and immediately process, at home our own rubbish (Source: @tusksupport25 2021, np link).

The main reason for the developed countries is wages are too high for this kind of work, no one is willing to do it for less. Also no company will do it for a loss. Developed countries relied too much on China and never had a plan to ever do all the sorting/recycling domestically (Source: @tankerock 2022, np link).

Plastic could be recicle locally (in the west) if virgin plastic were more expensive. Virgin plastic products should cost their real price, including pollution (Source: @chete013 2022, np link).

But you can’t artificially increase the cost of something for no reason. Other companies will simply undercut (Source: @tankerock 2022, np link).

it’s not artificial. Plastic pollution should have a price, like CO2 emissions. So no polluting (be reducing or innovating) will be an economic incentive (Source: @chete013 2022, np link).

I agree they SHOULD have a price, but how would you implement it? How can you increase the cost of plastics without increasing the cost of the product inside said plastic (Source: @tankerock 2022, np link)?

I hope this video can be seen by more people (Source: @gcsun499 2020, np link).

[It] should be known to more people (Source: @Lèi zhái zhī chuān huì 2021, np link)!!!!

The CCP try to ban this movie because money is king in China but they got caught with egg on their face (Source: @budschrome5506 2021, np link).

Good ban (Source: @kangli3416 2020, np link)!

This clown [director] made this video for two reasons: fame and fortune (Source: @pedrojiang6037 2018, np link).

The people in the video are so miserable, you have no sympathy at all (Source: @Talk to death 2018, np link)?

[Y]ou can never wake up someone who pretends to be asleep. In addition to plastics, how many other ‘decontamination’ and ‘industrialized’ industries are there that are doing things that will destroy your descendants every day (Source: @kennys4100 2018, np link).

The people in the video are so miserable, you have no sympathy at all (Source: @Talk to death 2018, np link)?

I like what I think it’s going for, and respect it for being about an important issue, but it’s so boring to watch after the first half an hour or so (Source: JeremyUrquhart 2021, np link).

It would make a good 30 minute doc but what he has here is repetitive. It’s a sad, interesting story but by the 30 minute mark you get the tragedy, the hopelessness (Source: dianebrauch 2019, np link).

I have no problem with documentaries not having narration or a clear story as well, but it needs something more to keep me engaged – better/great visuals, music, or truly purposeful editing could have helped this movie in that regard (Source: JeremyUrquhart 2021, np link).

The last song is such a great irony (Source: @shengjingsun3958 2019, np link).

Hearing this suddenly gave me chills (Source: @yin5710 2021, np link).

how long can you watch people sort and refine plastic (Source: dianebrauch 2019, np link)?

Even though the film itself is so depressing, the point isn’t that much clear (Source: randomjohn 2021, np link).

CAPITALISM IS THE BEST (Source: @brasilhistoriasminimasdesc4867 2020, np link).

let me harp on about the lack of techniques used here … the idea that anyone can make a movie has been extremely popular in the social media age … but not everyone should because i might have to watch it someday and if you’re creatively bankrupt while also not having any production value or cultural influence – why should i waste my fu*cking time? didn’t finish watching (Source: thedonovankidd 2021, np link).

I would not recommend this doc. It was torture to watch in many ways (Source: dianebrauch 2019, np link).

[I] gave it the benefit of the doubt and went with 1 star instead of .5 (Source: thedonovankidd 2021, np link).

[It’s] boring and sad, but important i guess (Source: lisa 2024, np link).

Probably for an unprepared American hipster at [the] Sundance [Film Festival] children and poverty are scary. But otherwise, [this is] an ordinary, and quite good documentary about waste and poverty (Source: MarkGubarenko 2017, np link).

I showed this video to my friends in Canada and they all fell into deep thought (Source: @Chénxiǎofān-s2r 2020, np link).

I had to watch it for school and did not expect to immediately be drawn into the story and the message of the documentary (Source: Jash 2023, np link).

The woman at 15:20 is clearly wary, she knows she can’t tell the truth to the media, she’s afraid of being punished by the government for saying the wrong thing (Source: @exlife9446 2022, np link).

This utterly sad. I am working hard on avoiding plastics! It’s insane how much plastic there is when you have to shop for FOOD (Source: Anon 2018b, np link).

What really bugs me is multi-buys, inevitably wrapped in totally unnecessary plastic. Why not just offer the equivalent in discount if you buy x separate items (Source: @sullivan912 2022, np link).

At first I tried to avoid buying too much plastic, especially things wrapped in plastic. But when you see all those children in developing countries working all day to sort out plastic waste … It would be a shame not to allow them to sort the plastics I throw away, they need to have a job and food, even if it’s just a bowl of rice a day, so I keep buying as much plastic as possible (Source: @0li_vi_er 2023, np link).

shut up or we’ll send you to plastic china (Source: Sea Floor Plan 2024, np link).

I learned a bit about plastic recycling some twenty years ago when for two months I walked the streets of the beach cities in the Los Angeles area collecting bottles and cans. I found out then that the plastic that was not deposit bottles was gathered into great shipping crates and sold to China. In turn many American companies bought the resulting pellets from China! This film shows why it was economic to ship the plastic waste to China and then effectively speaking buy back a value-added product. Quite simply the labor costs were and are so much less (Source: DennisLittrell 2017, np link).

The problem is that ‘developed’ countries have become throw away countries! There are many different thing to use besides plastics. I also agree with another comment that we should not be able to export our plastic waste, especially to a country that has such a bad reputation when it comes to the environment (Source: @troycrisman5065 2023, np link)!

Who can save the garbage-polluted environment, the poor and helpless people, and the hopeless children? What has the government done (Source: @jianmei2083 2023, np link)????

[Plastic China a] piece of history … (Source: @chete013 2022, np link).

… [that] set off a global garbage war (Source: Guozhen 2018, np link).

At 10pm on January 8, Wang Jiuliang discovered that his documentary ‘Plastic Kingdom’ [aka Plastic China] was ‘not displayed in search results according to the law’ on the Internet in mainland China. Prior to this, his ‘One Seat’ speech for this film also disappeared after being available for 4 days. … At noon on January 8, the day when ‘Plastic Kingdom’ was banned, Wang Jiuliang posted this Weibo: ‘Human suffering is waiting, waiting for the humiliated people to triumph’ (Source Xinqi 2017, np link).

The film may have struck a discordant note with the Chinese government: While Chinese official state media features interviews with Wang, all trailers and clips of the film can no longer be found on the Chinese internet and social media (Source: Kanthor 2017, np link).

Mr. Wang said he was perplexed by the censorship of his work on the internet. ‘Our goal is to let more people see it,’ he said. ‘We hope they would pay attention and changes could be made. But if the channel for communication is jammed, I have to reconsider what our efforts mean’ (Source: Zhao 2017, np).

Not long after the film premiered, … the Chinese government made moves to tighten restrictions on yang laji (‘foreign garbage’) (Source: Liebman 2018a, np link).

Su Zuorong, chairman of Taiwan’s recycling company Tongli Environmental Protection, said, ‘Because of this documentary, the Chinese government decided to ban the import of recyclables mixed with garbage last July’ (Source: Guozhen 2018, np link).

[In] July 2017, … the Chinese central government hit headlines domestically and internationally by announcing a ban on imports of 24 categories of waste, including many types of plastics (Source: Schulz 2019, np link).

In July 2017, … China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection notified the WTO that it would soon forbid importing four classes and twenty-four types of ‘solid wastes,’ including post-consumer plastics. The announcement sent ripples through the global scrap recycling industry, which relied heavily on Chinese buyers for almost two decades. As the ban has gone into effect, commodity prices for many types of scrap have dropped to the extent that markets are collapsing, and exporting countries are indeed being forced to deal with their own waste. The brilliance of Plastic China, however, extends beyond efforts to redirect global flows of waste (Source: Liebman 2018b, np link).

It is against th[e] backdrop [of the new Xi Jinping presidency and regime] that Plastic China came out in 2016. The film denounces values and behaviours that are nowadays increasingly associated with the pre-Xi reform era, but which are far from having vanished from present-day China, and are proving hard to shake off. It reveals the huge challenges faced by Xi’s project of ‘poverty eradication’ (xiaochu pinkun). Several experts I engaged with in recent months put forward the idea that the film prompted officials in Beijing to take this kind of action, or at least influenced them significantly. What is certain is that the film can serve as a justification for the outright ban on waste imports – irrespective of whether Wang ever regarded a ban as the proper solution to the problems he documented in his film. In this sense, Plastic China has arguably played a key role in the recent evolution of the trade in recyclable waste (Source: Schulz 2019, np link).

The brilliance of Plastic China, however, extends beyond efforts to redirect global flows of waste. The film captures an underworld full of agency, imagination, struggle, and inequality lurking across oceans, far from ‘recycling’ bins, yet intimately tied to them. It thereby begs for deeper reflection into the complex relations between waste, value, toxicity, and justice (Source: Liebman 2018b, np link).

[Director Wang Jiuliang] Sometimes you have to pay the price for telling the truth. Or rather, lots of people don’t want you to tell the truth. Of course, I never imagined that … my works would ultimately … lead China’s government … to completely ban the importation of garbage (Source: World Magazine video 2018, np link).

It is right to ban the collection of foreign garbage. Foreign garbage not only pollutes the environment, but also may bring diseases, agricultural pests, and cause ecological disasters (Source: @Yā sān-s6r 2021, np link).

When Yi Jie turned 11, Mr. Wang and the film’s producing companies spent their own money to send Yi Jie back to her hometown in Sichuan to go to school (Source: Zhao 2017, np).

In August 2014, the little girl was able to go to school and she is in third grade now. Kun closed down the factory and became a truck driver a year after [the film] was made (Source: Anon 2018c, np link).

I never anticipated the response … to our images and data once we showed them. It was so far beyond expectations. And very quickly, the Beijing City Government … invested 10 billion Rmb [about 1 million GBP] to clean up the landfills surrounding the city (Source: Wang in World Magazine video 2018, np link).

Fortunately, there is no import of waste plastics now (Source: @Yī mùjǐn 2020, np link)!

[Is] the situation there better now … (Source: @cashflowmagi 2020, np link)??

Five years later, I tell you that China is now doing a very good job in dealing with garbage, and the urban environment is getting better day by day (Source: @WWD7063wwd 2025, np link).

the trash just gets sent to other places 😟 (Source: @kungpaogao 2021, np link).

This documentary pretty much ended us shipping plastic to China. But now, it just ends up in a landfill instead. Is that a better solution? I honestly don’t know the answer (Source: @TitanFlare 2023, np link)?