Waste Tide in WASP-Land

CHEN QIUFAN –

TR. KEN LIU — WASTE TIDE –

2013–2019

This is a masterpiece with the main defect of all masterpieces, it sounds kind of timeless, out of time. We are in China in the waste industry before China reduced drastically its waste processing for mainly the US and Europe. But even if China is no longer the main actor in the field, some other countries, underdeveloped or just starting to develop, are in this business that is an industry that will take several decades to clean up and close up. And I will say nothing about the floating waste islands in the various oceans and the drastic consequences they have on the planet. See the Epilogue.

Apart from that, the depiction of this industry is outrageously sickening.

First of all, it attracts a lot of migrant workers, like everywhere in eastern China, because the salaries are motivating by being higher than in the rest of China and work is more regular, at times more intensive, despite regulations and controls. Many of these migrant workers keep links with their central or western provinces and their families, and they travel there once, twice or three times a year for the various one-week-long vacations and festivities like, first of all, the Chinese New Year. And since now China is developing full speed in the west and the center thanks to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) many of these migrants go back to their provinces to start a business or take some valorizing jobs. It is even possible to see migrant workers from the eastern provinces moving west to start businesses there. This is very important in Tibet and Uyghur country. Those provinces are developing at a tremendous speed because of these two demographic movements: back-migration of people originally from these provinces who went to the East to study, work, learn business, on one hand, and people from eastern provinces moving to western provinces to have a change in their lives, to be in new landscapes and climates, etc. At this level, the book reveals how the “waste people” as they are called, these migrant workers coming to this island on the Pacific or China Seas coast to work in this industry, are rejected and exploited by the “natives” of the area who are living more or less well on the back of these migrant workers. This is…