ABSTRACT
China has a long history of recycling; ‘everything was constantly recycled in a culture of thrift and poverty’ (Dikötter, 2006: 14). Frugality and thrift were part of the Confucian discourse that prevailed in a society of scarcity. This discourse advocated the need for a self-sufficient economy and considered wasteful habits to be part of a guilty lifestyle. Every material object could be turned into a commodity, and every commodity could be used and reused endlessly (Li S., 2002: 798). Goods that could no longer be recycled disintegrated on their own, since they were made from organic materials. Even human faeces was collected, mixed with food waste and other organic leftovers, and then dried and processed into fertilizer for use in the fields (Huang X., 2016). Recycling, sometimes by scavengers, took place both in the vast countryside and in the increasingly large, more urbanized areas that emerged along the Eastern seaboard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Downs and Medina, 2000).
