Beijing, China

Economic Expansion

The economy of Beijing has exploded since the 1970s along with garbage produced in this ever-expanding urban zone. Since 1978, the PRC has undergone gaige kaifang (reform and opening up) measures that have led to historically unprecedented levels of growth in personal wealth (though with a widening income gap). This has not been a uniform expansion with equally distributed benefits across the nation; large urban centers, such as Beijing, have disproportionately reaped the gains of these reforms. Led by state efforts at privatizing select sectors of the economy, attracting foreign direct investment, and allowing for an expanded personal employment market, not only has per capita gross domestic product (GDP) increased steadily in the capital, but a domestic consumer market has also taken hold.

Consumption Expansion

In addition to the PRC growing abstractly in terms of wealth, a structural change with economic and cultural ramifications has also occurred since the 1970s: the burgeoning consumer market. Before 1978, Beijing was barely a site of modern forms of consumption and consumer waste generation. A strictly limited range of choices in consumer products was readily available, while imported foreign items were almost impossible for the general public to obtain. Moreover, under the Maoist era before 1978, modern consumer values were not characteristic of the aspirations and dispositions of the citizenry of Beijing. Social norms and state ideology focused more on fostering a production-based economy and advocated the significance of consuming basic necessities, not consumer products believed to be characteristic of much-maligned Western capitalist cultures.

Beijing in the 21st century is a lesson in transformations brought about through economic expansion and rapidly changing consumer preferences. Shopping malls abound in the urban landscape as more and more wealth is spent in the capital on retail products. Within the capital, Beijing's residents saw an 8 percent increase in their disposable incomes in 2009, comparable to the average rate of yearly per capita income growth during the past decade. This is a provocative statistic, as garbage discharge in the city has also been growing in parallel at about 8 percent a year. Consumer marketing is in ascendancy as Beijing's citizens encounter billboards, print advertisements, social media, and television commercials on a regular basis. The combination of increased disposable income, the availability of a wide scope of goods, and a nascent cultural orientation toward consumptive practices has changed the scope of waste in Beijing.

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