Page 91 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

6 FROM “WASTE VILLAGE” TO “URBAN CIRCULAR ECONOMIC SYSTEM”… 77

recycling stations situated in every district and county and finally trans-
ferred to state-owned enterprises for reusing and recycling treatments.
During the market transition the central planning system was disman-
tled and state-owned enterprises, across the whole country, gradually
abandoned junk sorting and recycling. This was in part due to the scarcity
of financial resources but also to the lack of personnel, who were increas-
ingly attracted by more profitable jobs. The migrant rural workers seized
this opportunity and took the place of the community collection sites by
peddling door to door, collecting discarded goods from households, or
picking rags on the streets. Starting from the very bottom, some migrant
scavengers accumulated enough capital to move up the recycling value
chain. They rented rural land at the rural-urban fringe to buy recyclable
goods from other peddlers or door-to-door scavengers. However, this kind
of business was illegal until 2003.
Following the abolition of the administrative approval system for junk
markets in 2003, which eventually ended the monopoly of state-owned
recycling companies, the number of junk markets increased rapidly, from
the original 23 state-owned recycling stations to more than 120 junk
markets in 2004 (Liu et al. 2008; Shang 2006). Many of the state-owned
recycling stations suddenly confronted increasing competition from private
businesses run by migrant recyclers.
Dongxiaokou was one of the junk markets in Beijing, which grew at the
fastest rate since 2003. This was due to its convenient location and its
efficient organization for migrant recyclers. There were seven major mar-
kets run by different managers. Six of them came from Henan province.
Furthermore, more than 90% of the residential recyclers in Dongxiaokou
came from the same area in Henan. They depended on kinship networks to
run the whole chain of junk recycling. This included collecting on the
streets, sorting in small yards in Dongxiaokou and delivering final materials
to their customers outside Beijing, such as paper mills, plastics plants, and
metal workshops located in Hebei, Henan, Shandong and other cities.
Some recyclers even owned their own plants for processing secondary
materials and adding value outside Beijing.
Following the government decision to demolish Dongxiaokou in 2011,
the majority of migrant recyclers accepted the new reality and looked for
new places to move to. However, the market managers tried to contest the
decision through different channels. One manager from Henan, who ran
an iron and steel scrap market in Dongxiaokou, collaborated with a TV
channel in Shanghai to produce a documentary video on waste village