Page 88 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

74 X. TONG

different stakeholders in the system, including migrant rural recyclers and
local administration agents, and to think about the changing landscape of
waste through participant observation.

Spatial Shifts

In the last decades, the location of waste villages in Beijing has been
shifting outwards as the urban built-up area has been expanding. As the
experience of Bajia and Dongxiaokou demonstrates, waste villages have
become a special landscape that recurrently flourishes on the rural-urban
fringe, which is then devoured by the expanding city, and moves outwards
re-emerging in the shape of a new, even larger, waste village at the new
frontier of the urban sprawl.
Bajia was a village in the Haidian district in the north of Beijing with an
area of 1.6 square kilometres. In 1992, the former waste village in
Erlizhuang, to the southeast of Bajia, was demolished due to the urban
expansion. At that time, there was a recycling station in Bajia run by the
local government of Dongsheng Town. As a result, many urban scavengers
moved there, renting county yards from local peasants and starting junk
sorting and recycling activities. By the middle of the 1990s, more than
5000 rural migrants were working in the recycling sector in Bajia, sur-
passing the number of local residents. Because more than 75% of these
migrants came from Henan province (a populous province in central China
with large outflows of rural workers), scholars, in the field of migrant
labour studies, named Bajia the “Henan Village” (Tang and Feng 2000).
Because it is close to Zhongguancun, Beijing’s Silicon Valley, Bajia has
gradually specialized in e-waste recycling since the early 2000s. Migrant
scavengers with e-waste recycling experience in Guangdong province were
the first to develop this specialism. Later, more people became aware of the
business opportunities and entered the market. Because several large IT
markets, universities and R&D institutes are located in Zhongguancun, the
amount of discarded computers and peripherals increased quickly.
Recyclers used to collect e-waste from end users. Products that were usable
or repairable were refurbished and then resold in the secondary market. For
those unusable, recyclers used to disassembled them into plastic, glass,
metal, wire and electronic components, and sell them to the recyclers
outside Beijing for further processing. The e-waste recycling business was
so profitable that, till 2007, there were more than 20,000 migrants
flooding into Bajia.