Belly of the World: Toxicity, Innocence, and Indigestibility in Plastic China

In 2018, on the eve of the Trump administration’s trade war against China, the Xi administration inaugurated a ban on most plastic waste imports. Set in a small family-run plastic waste processing factory, Wang Jiuliang’s documentary Plastic China (2016) was rumored to have been an impetus for the ban. Approaching Plastic China as a cinematic portrayal of hinterlands, this chapter considers how ecocritical momentum is produced in the film by juxtaposing an aesthetics of the toxic sublime and a temporality of stagnation with the child as a figure of innocence and potentiality. Such waste and waste-times are not exclusive to China, but point to a reluctantly shared body between post/socialist and late capitalist worlds, as stubborn materials move through the intimate organs of the global digestive system.