Remains of the Everyday: A Century of Recycling in Beijing

by Joshua Goldstein

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520299818
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/22/2020
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	338
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Joshua Goldstein is Associate Professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Southern California and the author of Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera, 1870–1937.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix

List of Abbreviations xiii

Introduction 1

Part 1 The Republican Era (l912-1949)

Recycling of a Different Sort 23

1 Dreams of a Hygienic Infrastructure Deferred 26

2 From Imperial Capital to Secondhand Emporium 45

Modernity of a Different Sort 60

Part 2 The Mao Era (1949-1980)

Recycling According to Plan 65

3 The Rural Exile of Urban Wastes 65

4 Standardizing Chaos: Rationalizing the Junk Trades in the 1950s 91

5 Effortful Equilibriums of the State-Managed Scrap Sector, 1960-1980 119

Beijing's Waste-Scape on the Cusp of Market Reform 144

Part 3 The Reform Era (1980-Present)

Fighting over the Scraps 153

6 A Tale of Two Cities, 1980-2003 159

7 Top of the Heap 187

8 No Longer the World's Garbage Dump! 223

Whither Beijing's Recyclers? 255

Appendix: Timelines of Selected Events in the Recycling and Sanitation Bureaucracies, 1949-2000 265

Notes 269

Index 309

Editorial Reviews

"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. . . . The book is a great achievement. It is sure to reward readers with its astute analysis of recycling at a time when finding solutions to our global environmental crisis could not be more urgent."

Technology and Culture

"Remains of the Everyday significantly contributes to the state of research on Beijing’s modern history, urban governance, environmental policy, formal–informal economic dynamics and resource recovery."

China Quarterly