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Saying goodbye to a life of grime

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Liu Fengqin is resigned to moving house in the near future, but has no idea where she will go. However, the process isn't a new one for the 38-year-old mother of three who said she has relocated, sometimes unwillingly, at least five times in the past two decades.

Disused air conditioners stored in an open area in Dongxiaokou, a village in Beijing's northern suburbs, whose residents are mostly garbage collectors. [Photo/China Daily]

The family plans to take all their possessions with them: old furniture and clothing, slightly stained tableware, a gas stove ... and a few hundred disused air conditioners.

Liu and her family belong to Beijing's vast, but mostly ignored, army of waste collectors and recyclers, most of whom live in the village Liu is just about to vacate - Dong-xiaokou, once a small farming community in the northern suburbs of the Chinese capital, just outside the Fifth Ring Road.

In the early years of this century, the village ceased to be an agricultural center, becoming instead Beijing's - and arguably North China's - biggest space for the storage and recycling of electronic waste.

There's little left to remind visitors of the "golden times", though. The 2008 global economic meltdown hit trade hard.

Enforced demolition

Those who harbored hopes of staying on in the village saw those dreams shattered at the end of April when the government ordered the demolition of an area the size of six soccer fields. The process took a team of contractors equipped with bulldozers just three days to complete.

Some of the demolition work took place on the other side of the narrow road on which Liu and 50 other families run their businesses.

Once it was easy for new arrivals to find a foothold in this part of town dominated by former farmers who relocated to the city from Henan province in Central China, six hours from Beijing by train.

Once, the men who struggled to find their feet in the strange, impersonal city and who all spoke the distinctive Henan dialect, were consumed by the same desire, to get rich. Now they all face the same dilemma.

"Business was really good during the decade leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics," Huang Chunsheng said, as he stood outside his small brick house, hosing down a filthy, dust-filled air conditioner.

Huang was referring to the time when China's economy was growing at breakneck speed and large parts of Beijing were transformed into giant construction sites.

"All the hectic building created vast amounts of construction and industrial waste - metal, wood and plastic - which we purchased in bulk and sold to the little recycling factories that are scattered all over neighboring Hebei province."

The recyclers also bought from waste-collectors who stationed themselves outside numerous gated residential neighborhoods to offer meager sums for items the locals either no longer wanted or had no use for - ranging from empty bottles and old newspapers to used furniture and household appliances, and, almost inevitably, air conditioners.

"We cleaned and repaired the ones in relatively good condition and then sold them, directly and through middlemen, to people who were keen to buy secondhand stuff at a customer-friendly price," said Huang, a 41-year-old father of two. "Items beyond salvage were only valuable as raw materials. They probably ended up in those recycling factories, some transported by the freight trains that had previously carried coal and vegetables from Hebei to Beijing."

End of the good times

The upswing ended abruptly with the 2008 global financial crisis. Construction work stopped, people spent carefully and discarded cautiously, and buyers refused to accept as much raw material as before. As a result, prices began to fluctuate, sometimes violently, making what was once a risk-proof business a volatile proposition.

Despite the downturn, many residents stayed in Dongxiao-kou, often because there was no viable alternative. Now, though, they have to leave and the sense of anxiety is palpable.

However, according to Wang Weipin, who has spent the past three decades trying to infiltrate the little-known and even less-understood world of the garbage collectors and traders, the residents are simply bowing to the inevitable. The expansion and redevelopment of the city meant they were always likely to be displaced sooner or later.

"Theirs is both a world and an underworld, with its own set of thorny problems," Wang said. "In the early days, those who failed to collect enough trash frequently resorted to stealing, and between them may have snatched more than a few hundred drain covers, despite the risks posed to unwary pedestrians."

The village has also been targeted by those who say the residents' "unhygienic" operations are a source of pollution and, potentially, disease.

"They took whatever was saleable and dumped or burned the rest - for example, the insulating rubber coating of copper cables - in the vicinity," Wang said. "In the case of Dongxiao-kou, the strong winter winds that howl from the north to the south carry pollution in the form of airborne trash and dust far and wide into the city.

"The very presence of such a wasteland conflicts with the blueprint envisioned for Beijing by the incumbent government," said the 65-year-old, who was appointed as adviser to the Beijing Municipal Government because of his unrivaled knowledge of the Dongxiaokou area.

A new blueprint

Like many of the world's megacities, Beijing is strained under the immense pressure caused by its ever-growing population. Wrestling with many challenges - traffic jams and air pollution being two of the most serious - the central government has decided to reduce the city's multiple roles to make it China's political and cultural center. "That means activities peripheral to the fulfillment of those functions have to be stopped and relocated to areas outside of Beijing. The demolition of Dongxiaokou is being carried out in line with this policy," Wang said.

"I'm not saying that these people haven't made a contribution to the city. In fact they have. They've done a lot. But the growth of Beijing has reached a stage that necessitates the relocation of operations such as those carried out in Dongxiaokou for the past decade," he said.

However, according to former resident Xu Yuanhong, the move will achieve little, especially as the government has made no arrangements to help those who will have to move, and who, as tenants, have few legal property rights. "They have been told to go without knowing where they can go," said the 29-year-old, whose father, spearheaded the transformation of Dongxiaokou more than a decade ago.

"Back in 2001, with an investment of 2 million yuan ($321,000), my father rented 4 hectares of deserted land in Dongxiaokou which he divided up into little lots measuring 0.04 hectare. He then built simple brick houses - two on each lot," recalled the management graduate.

"What he had in mind was a permanent home-cum-workplace for those whose lives revolved around the city's waste. News spread by word of mouth and within three months, all 80 vacant properties were rented at around 3,000 yuan a month per lot."

New residents continued to arrive, however. People who, like Xu's father, saw and seized the opportunity to become a "big boss", and those who simply wanted to settle down, conduct business and "be among their own kind".

"The concentration of like-minded people created huge business opportunities for everyone. Dongxiaokou became something like a brand-name for buyers of recyclable waste," said Xu. "Aided by the country's economic boom, of which Dongxiaokou was both a mirror and a byproduct, people here started to make fortunes, big and small."

In the meantime, the area assumed a new appearance: The grassy, slightly desolate countryside was covered by a plethora of small low-ceilinged houses with front yards, connected by muddy, narrow roads. Businesses that traded in similar items clustered together, their arduously acquired commodities piled high in the open air.

A sense of pride

Despite the grime and arduous nature of their work, Dongxiaokou's residents saw themselves as an essential part of the city's infrastructure.

When she heard about the impending fate of Dongxiaokou in 2011, Chen Liwen, an environmentalist with Nature University, a Beijing-based NGO, began making videos to record the residents' lives. "I was struck by how acutely they remained aware of their importance to the city," said the 32-year-old, who first arrived in the area on a snowy February morning right after Chinese New Year. "It was their busiest time - Beijing had produced a month's worth of waste in just a few days," she recalled.

At one point, Chen encountered a waste collector, who took out an unbound notepad and started leafing through it with blackened fingers. "Look at how many wine bottles I've just collected! Just think what things would be like if we didn't do this," he said.

"There was a poignancy in his pride," Chen recalled.

Xu said: "At its peak, through the collection, trading and recycling of waste, Dongxiaokou provided livelihoods for nearly 30,000 people.

"The demolition risks returning these people to their pre-Dongxiaokou days, when they roamed the city and found temporary refuge in unlikely places," he continued. "I'm not saying that the removal isn't right. In fact it's very timely and unavoidable, especially given the speed of development in Beijing and the environmental issues that have long plagued the area. But these people are indispensable."

According to Xu, it's impractical to relocate operations outside the city boundaries because the increased transport costs would make the recycling businesses economically unviable.

"Compared with the burning and burial of waste, now a common practice in Beijing, recycling has the obvious advantage of creating less pollution and saving natural resources," he said. "Solving all these interrelated problems requires a farsighted approach, and vested interests must be curbed."

A new start

Three years ago, when the long-rumored demolition first became a certainty, Xu helped his father draft a detailed business plan to create a second, but far more wholesome, Dong-xiaokou on a piece of rented land farther to the north and seven times larger than the family's original plot in Dong-xiaokou. Despite their efforts, the Xus were disappointed.

"In that model, which was partly informed by standards adopted in certain European countries, the waste storage area was completely separate from the residential area. We intended to set up an ultra-large factory-cum-community in which people worked, but no longer lived with, the waste. There were even detailed plans for reducing the risks to safety and the environment, and for building community schools and shops, but no one gave the plan serious consideration," he said.

Xu now works for a large financial concern. The family sees their journey from a small village in Henan to Beijing's Central Business District as symbolic of recent changes in China, but they know their rise from rags to riches is a distant, unattainable dream for most of their former neighbors in Dongxiaokou.

Time to leave

Liu was busy rinsing a pair of skates for her youngest son, He Ming, an 11-year-old student at a primary school in Dong-xiaokou. The school, which is privately operated, doesn't receive government funding. The parents of the 300-plus students pay 2,500 yuan a year so their children can sit in the dilapidated classrooms with peeling walls and filmy curtains. However, it has allowed the children, who are unable to attend public schools because they don't have permanent residency permits for Beijing, to remain with their parents. Now, the school is due to be demolished too.

A blackboard bears the names of last semester's top 10 students. Liu was delighted to see her son's name on the list.

However, the boy will soon leave with his parents and siblings, joining the more than 100 students who have left since the beginning of last year.

"When I first came to Beijing, I was driven here by the poverty in my hometown, so I'm not going back at any price," said Liu. "We'll start a new life somewhere else, and I just hope that this time we'll find a real home."

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