Remains of the Everyday: A Century of Recycling in Beijing by Joshua Goldstein (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: Remains of the Everyday: A Century of Recycling in Beijing by Joshua Goldstein Peter Lavelle (bio) Remains of the Everyday: A Century of Recycling in Beijing By Joshua Goldstein. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. Pp. 323. This book begins with an ambition: to bring recognition to the undervalued workers who have served Beijing and its residents by collecting the city's rubbish. But it is much more than a social history of waste workers in China's capital. By exploring modern Chinese history through the lens of recycling, the book offers new insights about state-society relations, material culture, and the environment since the end of the Qing dynasty. Two major narratives run through the book. The first traces the changing structure of Beijing's sanitation, waste, and scrap industries. The author highlights the long-term, unresolved tension between the masses of informal workers involved in recycling, such as petty traders and rural migrants, and state institutions that have perpetually sought but often failed to assert formal control over them and their work. Prior to 1949, municipal authorities made only occasional attempts to regulate waste-related infrastructures and services. After the communists rose to power, they set up a slew of bureaucratic units designed to manage Beijing's garbage and recycling systems. Their interventions created divisions between industrial and household waste streams, and by 1957 certain sectors of the scrap trade that were crucial for industrial development had been taken over by state-run companies. But officials were unable to bring household recycling fully under their control, despite their best attempts to mobilize people's unpaid labor through mass campaigns and appeals to altruism. State influence over the recycling sector gradually eroded after the start of the country's economic reforms. By the 1990s, despite the government's efforts to marginalize them, migrants were availing themselves of ample opportunities to make money buying and selling scrap in the city's burgeoning recycling markets. The book's second narrative traces the relationship between China's development path and changing patterns in the reuse, recycling, and disposal of discarded objects. As the author shows, the ways people used things around them reflected the material conditions in which they lived. In the straitened circumstances of the early twentieth century, many urbanites had economic incentive to find new uses for old items, infusing city life with a constant recycling of materials—such as cloth and paper—that blurred the distinctions between consumption and production. In the Maoist era, the country pursued a course of development that led to "industrialization without disposability" in which discarded materials were viewed not as worthless trash but as "misplaced resources" (pp. 66, 149 and [End Page 1233] 77). As the state allocated scarce resources like scrap iron to industrial projects while emphasizing the virtue of thrift among citizens, many Beijing residents continued to reuse and recycle items out of economic self-interest, just as they had in previous decades. However, with the reforms of the late twentieth century, the country entered a new era of development in which rapid economic growth and the capitalist culture of disposability led to dramatic increases in the volume of rubbish. For the first time, post-consumer waste came to dominate the recycling trades, reshaping the entire industry in Beijing and beyond. The book also offers several lessons about China's recent environmental history. It shows how the spatial displacement of the scrap sector and its workers to the margins of the city became much more pronounced after the 1970s as officials started to view waste through the lens of environmental protection and pollution. The book also explains how China became a leading importer of plastics and other scrap from waste exporters like the United States in the early 2000s, with major consequences for ecological degradation and human health in certain parts of the country. This is a highly engaging and important book. It provides a rich introduction to a subject that has received only scant attention in historical scholarship. Occasionally the text drifts quite far from the topic of recycling in Beijing. In addition, the wide assortment of items it discusses—from late imperial night soil to twenty-first-century...