Shanghai, China

Economic Development

The PRC is a compelling site for considering both the relationship of consumption and waste production to economic development and the cultural specificities of refuse in social life. As a general rule, wealth per capita is positively correlated with the volume of refuse generated by each person in a country. This has been clearly evidenced in the PRC, where modernizing urban centers like Shanghai have increasingly produced more household waste and environmental pollutants per capita as individual real income has rapidly increased since the 1970s. However, with economic development has come the challenge of increased trash generation, with China producing about one-third of the world's garbage by 2010. Like many other leading urban locales in the PRC, Shanghai has struggled with how to manage the growing amounts of waste materials produced by its populace. Infrastructure and public-sector resources, ranging from landfill capacities to sanitation workers, are strained by the unwanted by-products of economic growth and consumption. In Shanghai, there exists a simultaneous dilemma of how to judge and intervene in the social norms of behavior that lie behind the culturally particular conditions of waste. From a heightened consumerism to nascent efforts at privatizing waste processing, the issues raised regarding refuse in China's economic capital are grounded in historically embedded practices.

Consider the economic explosion of Shanghai since the 1970s and its correlation with garbage [Page 809]produced in this mostly urban zone. Since 1978, the PRC has undergone “reform and opening up” (gaige kaifang) measures that have led to historically unprecedented levels of growth in personal disposable wealth (though with a widening income gap). Led by state efforts at privatizing select sectors of the economy, attracting foreign direct investment, and allowing an expanded personal employment market, not only has gross domestic product (GDP) per capita increased steadily in Shanghai, but a domestic consumer market has also taken hold. In the early 21st century, Shanghai and Beijing have constantly switched positions in rankings of cities with the greatest per capita income—and the greatest volume of waste generated—in China. And as the center of the Yangtze River Delta, which produces close to 20 percent of China's exports, Shanghai has attracted a population influx from rural areas searching for work in urban industries. These factors have directly contributed to the explosion in waste production within Shanghai.

Shanghai during the republican era of the early 20th century was the undisputed center of Chinese consumer culture, with China's first department stores and a landscape abundant with popular advertising. By the 1970s, however, after years of exposure to Maoist norms, this was gone. Shanghai was barely a site of modern urban forms of consumption and consumer waste generation. A strictly limited range of choices in household products was available to the general public, while imported foreign goods were almost impossible to find. Sites of middle-class food consumption, ranging from independent restaurants to global brand-name supermarkets, were nonexistent. Moreover, throughout the Maoist era before 1978, modern consumer values were not characteristic of the aspirations and dispositions of the citizenry of Shanghai. Social norms and state ideology focused more on fostering a production-based economy and advocated the significance of basic necessities, not consumer products characteristic of much-maligned Western capitalist cultures.

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