Dislocation and displacement: An analysis of Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China

Abstract

This essay uses the concepts of place and space to analyze Wang Jiuliang’s environmental documentary film Plastic China (2016) by examining three kinds of dislocation and displacement: the importation of Western trash to China, Yijie’s migration from Sichuan to Shandong, and Kun’s transformation from an agricultural peasant to an industrial worker in post-socialist China. Building on previous scholarship on dirt, rubbish, and ruins, the essay explores how the film’s focus on trash—“matter out of place”—sustains a critique of global consumerism, capitalism, and eco-colonialism. Cinematic features, such as the spatial imbalance the film constructs between its human subjects and the plastics processing plant where they work, are discussed. Yijie’s longing for home, a preindustrial place untouched by modernization and globalization, is evoked by the use of nondiegetic music. Her desire to go to school, a major narrative theme, is interpreted to indicate her spatialized alienation and non-locatable subjectivity as a migrant child. Although Kun is a native of the town where the processing plant stands, he experiences displacement without moving, as his hometown has been ecologically degraded and thus rendered inhabitable by the intrusion of toxic trash. Both Yijie and Kun, representing millions of Chinese peasants uprooted from the soil, are trapped in a one-way, no-return journey from place to space.