Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

It was a decent sentiment, I thought, as I stood in the midst of the illegally dumped garbage. I could imagine my mother feeling good filling a shopping bag like that with secondhand clothes. She would think her shopping was making the world a better place; that it was a form of recycling that helped the aged and the planet at the same time. It would upset her to think people on the other side of the world were paying an environmental price for her charity.

Nobody in Mai was asking for handouts, though the average income was considerably less than Britain’s state pension. Locals wanted something far more basic: clean air and water.

“The river is foul—we can smell it from our classrooms,” Wang Yanxia, a pupil at the middle school, told me during a noisy breaktime. “When it rains, the water floods onto the path and the stench is everywhere.”

Her friend Cui Yun said it had been like this since she had entered the school three years earlier. “My mother worries about my health. Lots of people get sick.”

The school was on a street full of small recycling firms that served as the intestine of the global economy, breaking down the world’s discarded plastic bags, bottles, and wrappers into tiny reusable parts. Most of the firms were little bigger than sheds, outside which stood blackboards detailing the type, color, and quality of the plastic they dealt in. Migrant workers from Anhui, Sichuan, and Guangxi sifted by hand through hundreds of thousands of tiny plastic pellets, picking out discolored flecks and bits of fluff. The recycled plastic was suitable only for weaving into low-grade sheeting, such as the ubiquitous red-white-and-blue coverings on building sites and the cheap carryalls used by migrants when they travel. One of the traders told me she bought semiprocessed bags for 9,000 yuan a ton (around $1,286) and, after painstakingly cleaning up the contents, sold the plastic for 10,500 yuan.

The cost was ditches full of garbage and a population full of health concerns. The village doctor said the area had an unusually high incidence of respiratory diseases that might be attributable to pollution. But he said locals were willing to pay the price. “This is a sensitive topic. Of course we want a gardenlike environment, but people here have to make a living.” A migrant laborer who was walking past the filthy stream agreed. “I don’t care about the environment. If your stomach isn’t full, how can you worry about your health?”

I was in Guangdong to examine the environmental price China had paid since opening up to global capital and markets. In 1979, this southeastern province was the first to trade with the outside world, and it had since become one of the richest regions in China. Much of its wealth was generated by regurgitating the muck of the global economy either in the form of garbage for recycling or outsourced dirty manufacturing. Fittingly for our globalized age, it was part economic miracle, part environmental tragedy. This was where most of the planet’s toys and shoes were made, where Apple outsourced much of the production of its iPods, where Wal-Mart filled its shelves, where Britain’s shoes and America’s toys and everyone’s Christmas decorations were made. Since the start of China’s economic reforms in 1978, Guangdong’s economy had grown more than a hundredfold to the point where it was bigger than that of Turkey, South America, and Finland. 2If it were a country, it could join the G20 of the world’s richest nations. It was also home to many of the dirtiest and most polluted places on the mainland. The expression “filthy rich” could have been made for Guangdong.

My intention was to sift through the province’s rubbish dumps to see where the filth came from. It was a muckraking exercise in both senses, a very deliberate search for the dark and dirty side of development, both in China and overseas. Digging for dirt is as much a part of a reporter’s role as reflecting background trends and describing the details of everyday life. Getting a balance between these elements is one of the biggest challenges of the job. To have any chance of achieving that, it is necessary to get out of the office and into the field. Stories rarely turn out as expected.

There was no shortage of places to investigate in Guangdong. Among the palm trees and factories of this semitropical manufacturing region were clusters of contemporary Sanford & Son businesses that dealt with yang laji, or foreign rubbish. Shopping bags and bottles were shipped to Shunde and Heshan from London, Rotterdam, and Hong Kong for chopping, melting, and remolding into pellets. In the electronic waste communities of Guiyu and Qingyuan, old computers, televisions, and home appliances from the United States, Japan, and South Korea were stripped down and broken up. On a bigger scale in Dongguang, Zhang Yin’s waste-paper empire has made her the richest self-made woman in the world, overtaking Oprah Winfrey and J. K. Rowling. 3

There seemed to be little stigma attached to waste. As I left Mai, my driver told me he was grateful for the foreign garbage. “In Guangdong, when we call someone a rubbish man, it’s a compliment,” he told me. “It means they have money.”

On a long, flat gray road, we passed the gates and buildings of countless factories and industrial parks, most of them joint ventures with foreign investors. Major international brands had home appliances, textiles, shoes, furniture, plastic bags, toys, and knickknacks manufactured and packaged far more cheaply here than in their home countries. When the goods were sold overseas, most of the profit went to the foreign brand owner and the retailer. A tiny share of the revenue remained in Guangdong, though the original product and its wrapping often made its way back here after it was used and discarded in the West.

After an hour’s drive, we reached the outskirts of Shunde, where the compressed bales of Dutch Kinder Eggs, Italian diapers, French Lego, and other European trash were stacked on the roadside. Reflecting the close proximity of Hong Kong and its British legacy, much of it was from the UK—Tesco milk cartons, Marks & Spencer’s cranberry juice, Kellogg’s cornflakes boxes, Walkers crisp packets, Snickers wrappers, and Persil powder containers. It was not just a compression of paper and plastic but of marketing slogans: “They’re G-r-r-reat!” “Aah! Bisto,” “Whiter Than White.”

In trade terms, it made perfect sense for the waste to be shipped across the world for recycling. Historically, British and other foreign merchants had always found it easy to fill their ships with goods on the route from China, but they often sailed in the opposite direction with empty cargo holds. When the economist and demographer Thomas Malthus foresaw the rise of Chinese manufacturing in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, he correctly predicted that this would lead to a trade imbalance because Britain would have little to offer in return. The gap, he said, would have to be made up with “luxuries collected from around the world.”

What that meant in practice was that my country became the world’s biggest drug dealer. British and Dutch merchants had already begun selling Indian-grown opium in Guangdong, then known as Canton, which was at the time the only open trading port in China. In the twenty years up to 1839, imports of this “luxury” narcotic surged fivefold, prompting the Qing emperor to impose a ban. The British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, responded as any self-respecting underworld boss would do by using force to protect and expand his business. 4Using coal-powered gunboats for the first time, the Royal Navy seized Hong Kong, blockaded the Pearl River, sank dozens of Chinese ships, and forced the Qing emperor to open up Shanghai and several other ports to foreign trade. For China, the crushing defeat in the First Opium War was a rude introduction to carbon-capital power. The ancient civilization never entirely recovered from the shock.