The Political Economy of Debris Dumping in Post-Mao Beijing

This article examines recent changes in the functioning of the state and in state-society relations in Chinese cities as market reforms have deepened. The pursuit of “Olympic urbanism” as a developmental strategy by the municipal government of Beijing—that is, hosting the mega-event as a means of capital mobilization for public investment conducive to the pursuit of economic and political ambitions—has involved a concentration of resources in certain sectors of the local government with a concomitant and significant weakening of the governing capacity in other sectors. The result has been an uneven capacity to govern. This in turn has opened up an important space for certain disadvantaged societal actors to maneuver for survival. It has sparked protest by the weakened sectors of the local government through, for example, the promotion of the work of a leading photographer campaigning for urban modernity. Based on field work in Beijing, this article demonstrates how the municipal leadership’s long-standing neglect of waste management has created leeway for a strategy of self-protection at the grassroots level of the society, and how the sectors of the municipal government in charge of urban sanitation have reasserted their position by publicizing the chaos of debris dumping through the work of an influential photographer. This case study shows the active role that rural villages have played in the transformation of the urban environment and their interaction with a reformed state that has become not just inconsistent and segmented but also self-conflictual and self-contradictory.