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.

垃圾收集和非正式回收能促进基层投资、提供就业机会、节约资源、保护环境。在中国城市有600万人从事非正式垃圾回收工作。2010年代, 北京有20至30万人（大多数是外来人员）在垃圾处理部门工作。伴随着“垃圾包围城市”的宣传, 北京的垃圾回收在国家和市政运动、企业利益和激进主义中占据了核心地位。2019年, 中国颁布了一项全国性的垃圾分类计划。该计划忽视了完善的外来人员垃圾回收体系以及自1980年代这些外来人员的生活经历。基于为期10年的北京市河南村研究和档案资料, 本文重建并展示了北京隐藏的外来人员回收地理, 包括它在国家许可下的萌芽、繁荣和频繁驱逐。我们探讨国家、市政府、城市居民和学者的关系, 如何决定措辞、如何界定正式和非正式垃圾回收。探讨了结构化的对垃圾和外来垃圾处理工人的弹性包容和持续排斥。这种结构化否定了外来人员公民权和社区迁移的事实存在。中国隐秘的、不断变化的“达拉维”（Dharavi）, 体现了外来人员的巨大韧性及其长期遭受的剥削和排斥。

La recogida de residuos y el reciclaje informal fomentan la inversión de base, creando empleo, conservando recursos y protegiendo el medio ambiente. Seis millones de personas trabajan como recicladores informales en toda la China urbana. Particularmente, durante la década del 2010, en Beijing trabajaron en el sector de las basuras y residuos entre 200.000 y 300.000 personas –principalmente migrantes–. Después de la publicidad que la etiquetó como “una ciudad sitiada por la basura”, el reciclaje de residuos en Beijing ha pasado a ser la escena central de las campañas estatales y municipales, de los intereses empresariales y el activismo. En 2019 China promulgó un plan de clasificación de residuos a nivel nacional, soslayando el elaborado sistema de reciclaje operado por los migrantes y las experiencias vividas por esta gente desde la década de 1980. Con base en el proyecto decadal aplicado a las aldeas Henancun, dentro de Beijing, y materiales de archivo, este artículo reconstruye y trae a la palestra la geografía oculta del reciclaje de migrantes de aquella ciudad: su germinación, florecimiento y frecuentes expulsiones, sancionadas por el Estado. Examinamos la interfaz entre el Estado, las burocracias municipales, los urbanitas y los estudiosos en la configuración de la retórica, la producción de una frontera entre lo formal y lo informal, y la estructuración de la inclusión flexible y la exclusión constante de residuos y los migrantes que los trabajan, todo lo cual resulta en una historicidad perturbada de las reivindicaciones de ciudadanía por los migrantes y las dislocaciones comunitarias. El “Dharavi” oculto y cambiante de China retrata la enorme resiliencia de los migrantes, lo mismo que su explotación y exclusión a largo plazo.

Key Words:

• Beijing
• China
• hidden geography
• informal waste recycling
• rural–urban migrants

关键词:

• 北京
• 中国
• 隐藏地理
• 非正式垃圾回收
• 农村-城市外来人员。

Palabras clave:

• Beijing
• China
• geografía oculta
• migrantes rurales-urbanos
• reciclaje informal de residuos

Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers and the Editor, Heejun Chang, for their careful and constructive suggestions to the article. This article is based on and part of long-term research work since 2009. Profound thanks go to the numerous participants and individuals who facilitated our field work over the years and the colleagues who generously provided feedback during different stages of this decade-long project.

Notes

Notes

1 The total amount is calculated based on data published at https://www.statista.com/statistics/300385/china-investment-in-environmental-pollution-treatment/.

2 Chinese media has popularized that 6 million people depend on waste picking in China, an estimated number originally quoted from a World Bank brief by Medina (2008). A Xinhua report (“Army of waste pickers” 2016) states 2.3 million were informal waste pickers or recyclers in China’s 664 cities between 1987 and 2006. Linzner and Salhofer (2014) estimated as many as 15 million could work in the informal waste sector, and a later news story (“Recycling the used” 2016) quotes a Ministry of Commerce of the PRC (2015) report that 18 million worked in the entire resource recycling industry in 2013, and that number dropped to 15 million in 2014, although 2 million more became informal waste pickers or recyclers that year.

3 According to the China Urban and Rural Construction Statistical Yearbook published by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of the PRC (MOHURD) at http://www.mohurd.gov.cn/xytj/tjzljsxytjgb/jstjnj/, 10.1 million tons of trash were collected and transported by the municipality in 2019, an increase from 5.38 million tons in 2006. By contrast, Shanghai’s municipal collected and transported trash had increased slowly from 6.58 million tons in 2006 to 7.5 million tons in 2019. Beijing’s number dropped significantly in 2020.

4 According to Xinhua (“Beijing officials suspended” 2017), a fire breaking out on 18 November 2017, at an illegally built three-story dorm for migrant rental housing in Xinjiang village, the southern suburb of Beijing, killed nineteen and injured eight. Several top district and township officials and other cadres were suspended. Based on Buckley (2017), this fire led to a widely criticized city drive against migrant neighborhoods and those who worked or lived in buildings deemed “dangerous or illegal” in Beijing 2017, evicting tens of thousands of migrants and their businesses shortly before winter that year. This sparked widespread criticism over the state’s past derogative use of “low-end” population to describe migrants; the state denied that the drive targeted “low-end” population.

5 Based on literature data and estimates, Linzner and Salhofer (2014) further narrowed down the interval to approximately 0.56 percent to 0.93 percent of the urban population or 3.3 to 5.6 million people.

6 Pointing out the many discrepancies of underlying methods and definitions used in these estimates from existing literature, based on migrant labor data in the early 2010s, Linzner and Salhofer (2014) estimated 151,900 to 182,280 work as informal waste collectors in Beijing.

7 An interdisciplinary field of discard studies has emerged online and united a group of scholars and activists, primarily from North America, around topics of waste, society, and culture over the past ten years.

8 According to Chinese scholars such as Tan (1997), migrant villages such as Zhejiang villages were “cleaned up and rectified” (qingli zhengdun) at least three times during the 1980s and 1990s by the Fengtai district government to control the “explosive” increase of migrant population and their concentration in the urban–rural fringe. The term guerrilla war has been used in Chinese journalistic reports and Chinese sociologists’ studies (such as those by Can Tang) since the 1990s.

9 Data from a Renewable Resources Work Newsletter by China Resource Recycling Association, republished by Non-ferrous Metals Recycling and Utilization 2006 (8):42–43.

Additional information

Funding

We thank the National Geographic Society, Michigan State University (HARP and Asian Studies), the Wilson Center, and an earlier NSF-DDRI for funding the field work, writings, and scholarly exchanges critical to our long-term project.

Notes on contributors

Guo Chen

GUO CHEN is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences & Global Urban Studies Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include poverty, inequality, social and environmental justice, slums, and migrants in the Global South, Asia, and China.

Jia Feng

JIA FENG is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Nevada, Reno, Reno, NV 89557. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include migration, migrant enclaves, marginality issues, and recycling in urban China.

Liwen Chen

LIWEN CHEN is the Founder of Zero Waste Village, an environmental nongovernmental organization in China. E-mail: [email protected]. She has dedicated over ten years of work to waste reduction, recycling, and education in urban and rural China.