From Trash to Punk: The Underside of China's Spectacular Urban Growth

Between concerns about economic bubbles, fears about official corruption, and angst over online censorship, cynicism runs especially deep in China these days. Perhaps the most obvious symbol of rot: record levels of bacteria-containing smog in cities like Beijing. But while the smog stories (and the fake smog stories) proliferate across the internet—and stir fears in the US about its downstream effects—two films in progress examine some of the other ugly aspects of the country's high-speed development through a lens of nuance and experience.

Documentary filmmaker and photographer Wang Jiuliang's Plastic China focuses on China’s recycling of imported plastics at a time when the country serves as the world’s largest recycler, importing about 70 percent of the recyclable plastics and e-waste on the global market.

This isn't entirely a problem. As Adam Minter, a trash maven based in Shanghai, details in his new book Junkyard Planet, China's recycling industry can be a vibrant and eco-friendly business, a core component of a global industry that's worth $500 billion per year. (He talked about the book in this recent video interview.) But in places like Guiyu, one of China's infamous toxic recycling towns, the costs of turning old computers into reusable raw materials can be as dangerous as they are hard to see. And the pile is rising: by 2017, according to the Solving the E-Waste Problem (Step) initiative, each person on the planet will discard a third more electronic waste than in 2012, a grand total by then of 65.4 million tons, much of it to be shipped from the developed to the developing world.

Scheduled for release this summer, Plastic China will be a follow-up to Wang's 2011 film Beijing Besieged by Waste, for which he spent four years documenting hundreds of hazardous and mostly illegal landfill sites around the capital city. The award-winning film provoked intense public discussion and was widely credited with spurring the Beijing municipal government to allocate 10 billion RMB (US$1.65 billion) to cleaning up the local waste industry. Wang returned to the landfills recently, and estimates that at least 80 percent of them have been closed or upgraded. “With his photos and film, Wang Jiuliang has single-handedly accomplished what many NGOs in China had worked hard toward for decades—raising public awareness and bringing about policy change,” environmental activist and filmmaker Shi Lihong told ChinaFile, which has a nice new video interview with Wang:

If China, with its increasing influence in Africa, sets an example for the rest of the developing world, Beijing, with its rapid "harmonious" development and political and cultural bone fides, is often seen as a model to be copied by the rest of China. But filmmakers Matthew Niederhauser and John Fitzgerald turn this premise on its head in another in-progress film called Kapital Creation. Taking a wider angle, the film chronicles a 20-million-strong city in the years following its build-up for the Olympic Games, in the throes of unprecedented growth.

"An additional 350 million people are expected to move into cities across China by 2025, pushing the overall urban population to over a billion," Niederhauser says, making China's "undoubtedly the largest infrastructure buildout in the history of mankind." This new China, he told Cool Hunting, "potentially faces natural resource depletion, exponentially higher energy use and crippling pollution. China will be forced to lean on an already overburdened world in order to sustain the sheer immensity of such development, especially with Beijing setting such a precedent."

The film promises a spectacular panorama of the city as it surges up and out, and features interviews with a number smart, sharp-tongued Beijingers, like architects Jie Hu and Neville Mars, artists Ou Ning and Ai Weiwei, and pundits He Shuzhong and Michael Pettis. There's also a considerable amount of punk music too, courtesy of the rock scene that Pettis, an economist and club owner, has helped to nurture. The music is a reminder that while the race to develop China's cities continues, sometimes evicting those who would stand in its way, the collateral damage to the country's intangible culture isn't limited to traditional villages, 300 of which are said to disappear every day: the city's cutting-edge culture isn't safe from cutting-edge development projects either.