Remains of the Everyday

A Century of Recycling in Beijing

Joshua Goldstein

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520971394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

Remains of the Everyday traces the changing material culture and industrial ecology of China through the lens of recycling. Over the last century, waste recovery and secondhand goods markets have been integral to Beijing's economic functioning and cultural identity, and acts of recycling have figured centrally in the ideological imagination of modernity and citizenship. On the one hand, the Chinese state has repeatedly promoted acts of voluntary recycling as exemplary of conscientious citizenship. On the other, informal recycling networks—from the night soil carriers of the Republican era to the collectors of plastic and cardboard in Beijing's neighborhoods today—have been represented as undisciplined, polluting, and technologically primitive due to the municipal government's failure to control them. The result, Joshua Goldstein argues, is the repeatedly re-inscribed exclusion of waste workers from formations of modern urban citizenship as well as the intrinsic liminality of recycling itself as an economic process.

PART ONE

The Republican Era
(1912–1949)

Recycling of a Different Sort

In February 2008, while roaming around the fourth and fifth ring roads of Beijing checking out scrap markets, I dropped in on an illegal/unregistered market of about thirty stalls, wedged under the high-power-lines near Shashichang road in Haidian district (the market was demolished in 2010). I was chatting with the boss of a wastepaper stall, who was supervising a front-end loader heaping cardboard onto a five-ton truck. Chinese New Year had just passed, so his stall was strewn with colorful wrapping paper and burned-out fireworks launchers—charred cardboard packs full of chemical dust. As the loader scraped the last scoops from the unpaved ground, lifting more dirt, soot, and plastic than paper, I asked the boss a question that I also asked of a lot of paper-stall bosses over the next few weeks, until I finally realized how stupid it was: “Is it really OK to ship that? Won’t your buyer complain about all the dirt and trash in there?” The answer I got was always something like: “No problem.” I should have realized that, of course, these guys know what they can ship to their buyers; obviously many small Hebei paper factories were taking this kind of mangy load, even though the material had hardly been cleaned or sorted.

The “sort” is a key stage in any recycling process; a lot of value can be created by doing it properly, and even more can be lost by messing it up. Metal alloys and plastics are particularly tricky to sort, requiring skill and experience if not a few testing gadgets or techniques. Beijing collectors, like those in most cities these days, sort their paper into a few rough categories (newspaper, cardboard, office paper, and mixed paper), selling it in rough heaps. In Republican Beijing, however, wastepaper picking was of an entirely different “sort”:

When my father [a drum beater] roamed the street collecting scrap, it was mainly book paper and newsprint. At night he’d sort it [fenlei shoushi]. He’d smooth each sheet of newspaper and tie it into neat stacks to sell as packaging paper—the small shops and stalls selling sundries like candy, beans, melon-seeds, all used newspaper the way we use plastic bags today. Unprinted paper he’d sort by width; those between 10 and 20 centimeters, small book makers would cut to size and make into books [ding benzi] for notes, drafts and homework for students—they were a lot cheaper than buying a notebook. . . . What he couldn’t sell became [raw material] for paper-makers.¹

Sorting sheet by sheet, Republican-era pickers preened their paper for reuse. Only the irredeemable bits went to be pulped and recycled (traveling, interestingly, to some of the same counties near Baoding, Hebei, where paper scrap still goes today).

A comparison of sorting methods reveals a lot about the changing and abiding logics of recycling regimes. In Republican Beijing, reuse outweighed recycling (both in value and volume), and the patchwork crafts and ingenuities of repurposing were central to the city’s daily economy and commoner subsistence. Today secondhand and reused goods are a small fraction of Beijing’s gargantuan postconsumer waste recycling stream. Still, the economic logic that reuse almost always yields more value per pound than recycling remains true today, with “e-waste” (discarded electronics) being a prime example: an appliance or computer that can be repaired and refurbished for reuse and resale is far more valuable than that same unit after being dismantled or shredded into so much metal, plastic, and other materials.

The snack wrappers and copybooks made from the drumbeater’s newssheets were made in the neighborhood, with the paper traveling a few miles at most before being repurposed and resold. Today’s used cardboard or newspaper is trucked in compressed one-ton blocks across hundreds of miles for pulping and processing and then often overseas for resale. But lest we wax nostalgic for the quaint local culture of Republican Beijing, I should note that the newspaper sheets the drumbeater painstakingly smoothed were almost certainly imported from the United States or Japan. Republican Beijing had no mills capable of making newsprint, so it was all imported from abroad. Aspects of global trade, economic and technical inequality, and resource scarcity underlie both scrap paper stories, though in profoundly different configurations.

The following two chapters offer a composite sketch of postconsumer waste management and usage in the first half of the twentieth century, ranging over a hodgepodge of flotsam and jetsam and straddling several historical watersheds. Chapter 1 describes the handling of materials addressed by the city government as sanitation concerns: human excrement, coal dust, and street trash. Chapter 2 sketches the trades in disused paper, handicraft materials, used clothes, metal scrap, antiques, and other materials, trades that taken separately were too small in scale to attract great attention from the city government aside from attempts to tidy up the city’s appearance and deter the trafficking of stolen goods. Taken collectively, however, these trades can be seen as a sector of reuse/recycling that added together were of great significance to the city’s material metabolism, economy, and culture. My excuse for lumping this array of scrap, crap, and effluvia together is that all constitute postconsumer wastes that one way or another were products of Beijing people’s daily lives. They are loosely commingled in an inextricable tangle of hygienic, economic, logistical, and ideological relations. The narrative here describes an inconsistent but discernible pressure from city governments to open these trades to state-legitimated managerial intervention. While Beijing governments prior to 1949 made some limited headway in getting a handle on the city’s panoply of wastes, the PRC government would bring urban wastes and scrap to unprecedented heights of legibility and government control, levels that proved impossible to attain before or since.

1

Dreams of a Hygienic Infrastructure Deferred

Shit, coal ash, food waste, scrap materials (wastepaper, rags, scrap metal), and secondhand goods (pawned clothing, used books, antiques): in terms of material mass, that was more or less the ranked order of postconsumer waste and goods generated in Beijing across the first fifty years of the twentieth century.¹ Approaching the urban system metabolically, the bulk of the city’s material inputs (food and coal) issued from North China’s rural and mountain regions. Those inputs were transformed (into ash and excrement) by residents, who consumed them and then sought to eject the remnants from their immediate space. The processes of ejecting and (when beneficial/ profitable) processing these wastes posed headaches for Beijing’s underfunded municipal governments, which increasingly were charged with the mission of modernizing and sanitizing urban life. This chapter explores the management of materials and services that would come to be subsumed under the heading “urban sanitation.” It begins with the infrastructural backdrop of sewer systems, street cleaning, and sanitation codes, systems aimed at maintaining thoroughfares and public spaces, thereby shaping how waste materials could move and where they were or were not allowed to accumulate. I then focus on what was by far Beijing’s largest waste recycling industry: the collection of night soil for fertilizer production.

BELOW AND ABOVE THE STREETS

Beijing’s stone and brick sewer system dates from the late thirteenth century, and its expansion during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) made it one of the most comprehensive sewer networks in the world at the time. By the mid-1800s there were over eighty kilometers of large sewer mains and three hundred kilometers of smaller ones, mostly dedicated to the imperial palace and Inner City, where high-ranking Manchu officials lived. The Outer City’s network was less extensive and was expanded haphazardly to meet the needs of merchants and commoners.² As in most cities before the late nineteenth century, these sewers were intended primarily for rain runoff and flood prevention rather than waste removal. Beijing’s primary system for handling human excrement up through the 1950s was night soil porters, who collected human waste to be made into fertilizer cakes, similar to the poudrette of Paris. In other words, far into the twentieth century, human excrement was a valued commodity in Beijing’s regional agricultural system and functioned as “waste” in fairly limited contexts, such as when it disrupted the city’s drainage system.

As was the case in pretty much every city where sewers were built, many Beijing residents used them to dispose of their effluvia, despite prohibitions against doing so.³ Residents who lacked privies typically dumped their chamber pots early each morning into the streets’ sewers and gutters. Accumulations of garbage and feces in the sewers were a chronic headache, making regular and emergency cleaning necessary to prevent clogging and flooding, a job that in addition to being foul was dangerous; suffocating from sewer gas was a distinct possibility.⁴ In Beijing the annual sewer cleaning became a customary rite of spring, coinciding with the arrival of scholars to sit for the imperial exams.⁵ The spring cleaning was the inspiration for a few ditties like this one:

Down along the avenues the gutters run,

One misstep and their depths you’ll plumb.

Muck heaps up and blocks the stream

Opened once each spring to repair and clean.

From the murky black depths evil airs arise

And one sewer man after another dies.

Pestilent gases spread, sewer fumes bring infirmity

Attacking people’s health with seasonal regularity.⁶

By the nineteenth century it had become customary for pedestrians to carry “perfumed rosaries” during this season to fend off the odors.⁷

These spring cleanings were hardly adequate to unclog an infrastructure that had served the city for centuries. In 1916 a comprehensive survey of the system revealed that 85 percent of the city’s sewers were clogged or in a state of partial or complete collapse. Neither municipal nor national governments could afford the comprehensive reconstruction—such as replacing rectangular stone channels with relatively self-cleansing, rounded concrete culverts—of more than three hundred kilometers of sewer. And even if self-cleansing sewers were built, they would still require substantial water flows to function properly, something Beijing was sorely lacking. The Beijing Waterworks Company, which in 1910 began supplementing the city’s limited well-water supply, grew sluggishly at best because most Beijing households could not afford its services.⁸ A sewer system that would use such a valuable resource to flush away human waste was far beyond the city’s economic and natural endowments.

The city’s second line of waste-handling infrastructure, the phalanxes of street cleaners, sanitation patrols, and garbage collectors responsible for keeping city streets clear of garbage and manure, was of newer vintage than the sewers. Street cleaners were Beijing’s first state-managed sanitation workers, formed in 1906 under the Metropolitan Police Board. The affiliation of sanitation with policing in China’s capital was largely modeled after similar reforms undertaken in 1902 in the treaty port city Tianjin under the leadership of Yuan Shikai. Tianjin had been under the control of the Tianjin Provisional Government, an occupying regime of foreign imperialist powers that had seized control of the Chinese part of the city in 1900 during the Boxer uprising. Ruth Rogaski argues that Yuan developed Tianjin’s public health offices, the first municipal public health department in the country, in large part to persuade the powers to return that part of the city back to Chinese control: “Without the ability to administer hygienic modernity, the Qing would not be allowed to administer Tianjin, nor, potentially, the empire.”⁹ “Hygienic modernity” is Rogaski’s translation of the term weisheng (卫生) as it came to be used in twentieth-century policy discourse. As she elucidates:

Weisheng suggests a harmony of interests between public space and private behavior, presided over by an enlightened and effective government. A weisheng city is free of odors, dust, and harmful bacteria; its streets are ordered and lined with greenery. City residents who practice weisheng do not excrete or expectorate in public places, refrain from littering, and maintain a healthy distance between themselves and other individuals. With its complex allusions to science, order, and government authority, weisheng may best be translated as “hygienic modernity,” a major cornerstone of the twentieth-century urban ideal.¹⁰

The city’s low-paid sanitation workers and street sweepers, who were mobilized, sometimes by force, as the front line in the battle to conquer urban refuse and filth, hardly lived or worked in conditions that enabled them to experience or embody these ideals; nevertheless, the shining vision of modern sanitary urbanism would fuel the genesis of many of the reforms described in this and subsequent chapters.

Beijing’s first street cleaners, numbering around one hundred, were waterers (shui fu), tasked mainly with sprinkling roadways around the imperial palace with water to damp down the city’s notorious dust and dirt and ensure the Qing (1644–1911) court’s immediate surroundings were attractive and salubrious. Following the fall of the Qing, such cleaning was extended beyond the palace area; workers were renamed street cleaners (qing dao fu), and their ranks expanded to cover both the Inner and Outer Cities. In 1928, when the Guomingdang (GMD; the Nationalist Party) reorganized Beijing into the Beiping Special Municipality, these cleaning teams (qingjie dui) included fifteen street-cleaning brigades and one brigade of sprinkling trucks. Briefly placed under the separate Sanitation Office, then shifted back under the police due to lack of funding, then back again to the expanded Sanitation Bureau, these brigades were batted to and fro by municipal bureaus several more times prior to the CCP’s victory in 1949.

These brigades were responsible primarily for the upkeep of the city’s major thoroughfares; the alleyways of most residential areas did not enjoy the caress of their municipally supplied brooms. Instead, city bylaws gave residents responsibility for cleaning the street around their doorways. Regarding the cleaning of sewer grates, which were something like metal cages that caught large bits of rubbish borne by street runoff, Sydney Gamble recorded that emptying these boxes and carting off the refuse was a service paid for by local residents and performed mostly by the “inmates of poorhouses.”¹¹ As Janet Chen describes, Republican-era police frequently i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One. The Republican Era (1912–1949)
• Part Two. The Mao Era (1949–1980)
• Part Three. The Reform Era (1980–Present)
• Appendix: Timelines of Selected Events in the Recycling and Sanitation Bureaucracies, 1949–2000
• Notes
• Index