Page 87 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

6 FROM “WASTE VILLAGE” TO “URBAN CIRCULAR ECONOMIC SYSTEM”… 73

1990s as marginal spaces dramatizing multiple problems associated with
China’s social transition (Tang and Feng 2000). Existing literature has
addressed the economic linkages between the emergence of waste villages
and the transition of the urban recycling sector from a planning system to
market forms of organisation. Under central planning China used to have a
comprehensive waste collection and recycling system in which recycling
activity was presented and celebrated as central to the socialist economy’s
resource conservation actions (Goldstein 2006). This system collapsed
during the transition from a planned to a market economy, along with the
social values attached to it, starting from the beginning of the 1980s.
The consumption behaviour of urban citizens has changed dramatically
in the last three decades, and the urban recycling sector has become
increasingly integrated into junk-buyer networks mainly consisting of
migrant rural workers. A spatial division of labour has emerged along the
chains of recycling and waste disposal activities, from the urban pickers on
the streets, to the junk sorting and local markets for recyclable goods, to
the recycling clusters in rural areas decentred from urban centres, where
recyclable materials are further processed into secondary materials or
products (Li 2002; Linzner and Salhofer 2014).
The two waste villages analysed in this paper are concentration sites of
junk sorting and markets on the rural-urban fringe, which is the pivot
between rural and urban along the constant conversion chains of
waste/recycling activities across the country. According to Liu and col-
leagues (Liu et al. 2008), there were more than 120 concentrated markets
for recyclable goods in Beijing in 2004 with total land areas up to 240 ha.
Among these only 24 had licenses from municipal authorities. The majority
were on land rented from villages near the city, attracting large number of
urban scavengers to do junk sorting nearby.
Our study focuses on two sites among the waste villages existing in
Beijng: Bajia and Dongxiaokou. Field studies were conducted between
2007 and 2013. We witnessed the demolition of Bajia around the time of
the Olympic Games, and the struggle against the demolition of
Dongxiaokou, the biggest urban recycling centre in Beijing, in 2011. To
investigate their linkages with the city, we conducted on-site interviews
with more than 100 urban scavengers scattered in different residential areas
in Beijing in 2012, observing their working conditions, and discussing
possible public-private cooperation in community-based recycling projects.
This work, which is part of a project for building an enhanced e-waste
management system in China, provided us with opportunities to access