Everyday Modernity in China

8. The Remains of the Everyday: One Hundred Years of Recycling in Beijing

8 The Remains of the Everyday One Hundred Years of Recycling in Beijing joshua goldstein An August 2001 article in the Southern Capital News titled “Suspecting his junk has been stolen, [man] brutally beats his fellow traveler” began: “While on a passenger train, Mr. Jia beat and critically injured his colleague [tonghang] Mr. Luo in a struggle over a single empty plastic spring-water bottle.”1 According to the report, two scavenging “trash hicks” (lajilao) clambered through the cabin windows of a train at a stop in Hunan. They soon came to blows, and Mr. Jia, in the end, made oª with a sack containing Mr. Luo’s entire day’s worth of gleanings. The journalist, in a tone mixing mockery and pity, highlighted both the drama and the pathetic pettiness of the incident by claiming that it was all for the sake of a single plastic bottle worth at most five fen (0.05 yuan), or half a cent in U.S. currency. The article’s sarcastic tone conveys a fairly typical urban condescension toward rural migrants and provides yet another glimpse of what Yan Hairong described in chapter 7 as “the discourse of suzhi,” albeit a more casual and blatantly degrading voicing of that discourse. My primary purpose here is not to analyze the discursive construction of China’s rural-urban divide, as profoundly important as that project is. Rather, I want to locate this incident and its journalistic coverage in a longer history of urban gleaning and recycling. The economics of collecting and processing junk and scrap in China have changed drastically over the last century, echoing , if not coinciding with, the political-economic periodization of republican (1911–49), socialist (1950–80) and postreform (1980–present) eras. An investigation into the shifting practices of recycling and reuse sheds light on some interesting changes in social and economic relations across these eras. People’s small, daily acts of recycling and waste disposal often carry profound implications about the regimes of economic development under which they live; indeed, we might even be able to chart a changing imaginary of citizenship , society, or nationhood through the changing daily-life habits and rhythms of recycling in urban China over the last century. Returning to Luo and Jia’s brawl on the train: in alleging that their fight was over something as trifling as a single plastic bottle, this news item functioned as yet another round of ammunition in an arsenal of character assassination directed at rural migrants. By slightly shifting the terms of its interpretation, however, we can use this slapstick tale of brutality to broach what is currently the ground of a massive political and economic contest in cities throughout China. Luo and Jia were not arguing merely over the possession of a single bottle; the real issue at stake was, Who has gleaning rights over this specific public space? In this case the space was a train compartment, but today, in every major Chinese city, thousands of bureaucrats and entrepreneurs and tens of thousands of rural migrants are in a heated contest over precisely this question of gleaning rights, and the public spaces at issue are as large as the cities themselves. In Beijing alone there were likely over 120,000 rural migrants who survived by one form or another of refuse scavenging in 2003.2 Tens of thousands of these, like Luo and Jia, daily comb the streets, apartment complex refuse bins, roadside waste heaps, and shopping mall trashcans looking for recyclable scrap and bottles. A few thousand climb and pick through the heaps of putrid tonnage that daily arrive at the city’s landfills. A hundred or so specialize in recovering recyclable wastes, especially fats, from sewers. The largest segment, maybe half of those laboring in the scrap collection trade, can be seen every evening pedaling bicycle-drawn carts (sanlunche), piled high with cardboard, plastic bottles, newspapers, and metal scrap, toward the outskirts of the city. Many of these carters have struck up informal contracts with shop owners or managers of residential compounds and have received “permission” to ply a daily route or to station themselves in a fixed location.3 Most of these carters first purchase waste items from area residents and businesses and then haul their payload to outlying collection markets for resale at a slightly higher price to dealers who specialize in specific categories of scrap: newspaper , cardboard, plastic, glass, iron, aluminum. In 1998 these collectors and The Remains of...