Horror movie: Beijing Besieged by Waste

This 69 minute doco (available on uTube) of landfill sites around Beijing has left me flabbergasted - it would have done so even if I hadn't been invested in ANQ. It is a powerful documentary highlighting the gargantuan scale of the waste problems facing cities like Beijing . It also mentions the fact that new solutions - e.g. incineration projects - are meeting strong resistance from Joe Public. You can't watch this movie and arrive at any other conclusion than that China desperately needs what ANQ has to offer. IMO it would be criminal if politics stood in the way of that happening.

For me it has provided a challenging new perspective on my very first world worries about the share price.

Extract from sensesofcinema.com review
Like many of China’s independent documentary films, the making of Beijing Besieged by Waste was itself a form of political activism, and in a country where such research can be dangerous. Wang used satellite images from Google Earth to look for signs of landfill sites, racked up 17000 kilometres on his motorbike following garbage trucks around Beijing, and kept a deliberate low-profile throughout his investigations. With each new discovery, Wang added a yellow dot to his map of Beijing and, in the end, had identified more than 460 landfills and tips situated around the outskirts of the city – a rim of consumer refuse surrounding this glittering international metropolis like a scum ring in a bath.

...Beijing Besieged by Waste is perhaps one of the rare examples of a documentary film that has had an effect on Chinese government policy. In an unexpected turn of events (and one which helps to nuance stereotypes of a Chinese government deaf to the needs of its people) the film was included in an internal Party report by the Xinhua Media Agency and later watched by Premier Wen Jiabao. According to Wang’s contacts at Xinhua Media, the Premier reviewed the information in the film very closely, and later issued orders for local officials to attend to the illegal or mismanaged sites.

“By 2011, 80 per cent of the dumps had been closed or were being dealt with”, says Wang. “That’s a pretty big difference, and it was very comforting to me. It made me feel like my work hadn’t been for nothing.”
What ultimately happened to the waste, or to the people who had been making a living off it, is the next question. It could be argued that Wen’s response is typical of official window-dressing, addressing the symptom but not the cause of the problem. Consumption continues, and with it its waste. The transfer of Beijing rubbish further beyond the city limits is only its relocation to another neighbourhood. However the making of films such as Beijing Besieged by Waste is itself part of the process that creates space for discussion, especially in China where the sphere for such publicly critical reflection is comparatively limited. Like Josh Fox’s Gasland (2010), about coal gas seam mining or “fracking” in the United States, Beijing Besieged by Waste exposed an environmental problem of national concern, raised public awareness, and has had powerful flow-on effects.