Dharavi in Beijing? A Hidden Geography of Waste and Migrant Exclusion

Abstract

Waste-picking and informal recycling promote grassroots investment, providing employment, conserving resources, and protecting the environment. Six million people work in informal recycling across urban China. In particular, in Beijing in the 2010s, between 200,000 and 300,000 people—mostly migrants—worked in the waste sector. Following the publicity of being labeled a “city besieged by garbage,” Beijing’s waste recycling has taken center stage in state and municipal campaigns, enterprise interests, and activism. In 2019 China promulgated a nationwide garbage sorting plan, ignoring an elaborate migrant-run recycling system and the lived experiences of those migrants since the 1980s. Drawing from a decade-long project on the Henancun villages within Beijing and on archival materials, this article reconstructs and brings to the foreground the hidden geography of Beijing’s migrant recycling: its state-sanctioned germination, flourishing, and frequent expulsions. We examine the interface of state, municipal bureaucracies, urbanites, and scholars in shaping rhetoric, producing the boundary between formal and informal, and the structuration of flexible inclusion and constant exclusion of waste and migrant waste workers, resulting in disrupted historicity of migrant citizenship claims and community dislocations. China’s hidden, shifting “Dharavi” features the enormous resilience of, and long-term exploitation and exclusion of, its migrants.