The scrap trader was immovable, despite Wu Wenxiu’s pleas. She would pay 1 yuan — roughly US$0.15 — for a kilogram of plastic. Around the corner in Shi Yuhai’s yard, the offer was no better. Wu shrugged his shoulders and began to heave bags from his tricycle on to the scales.
“One kuai [yuan] here, one kuai there — everywhere’s the same these days. This industry has broken down,” he grumbled.
Wu is one of 160,000 collectors in Beijing who make a living from the detritus of urban life. Recycling has become a global industry and China is the largest importer of the world’s waste materials. Then came the slump.
ILLUSTRATION: YU-SHA
“It’s a canary in the coalmine: it’s the front and back end of industry,” said Adam Minter, who runs the Shanghai Scrap blog and specializes in the metal trade.
“Until about eight weeks ago, for example, the entire [US] west coast paper market was sent to China and most of it was sent south. It was processed and made into packaging for products that [were] then shipped back to the US ... But when US consumer demand dropped off, that broke the cycle,” he said.
Across the scrap trade, prices have halved or worse in a matter of months. Each link in the chain is disintegrating, from factories to scrapyards to collectors such as Wu, 56, a former farmer who now plans to return to Hubei Province.
Official media reported that four-fifths of China’s recycling units had closed and that millions will eventually be left without employment.
Dongxiaokou, on the outskirts of Beijing, is a village composed of scrap: Blocks of crushed metal are stacked in a tower, heaps of plastic bottles glint in the sunshine and piles of newspapers and rags fill yards. But the merchants all have the same story — they have lost tens of thousands of dollars in a few months, wiping out years of hard work.
Shi puffed on a cigarette as he counted out notes for Wu.
“I’ve been in this business for 15 years and it’s been bad before, but never this severe. Everyone’s lost a huge amount of money and some can’t sell their stock,” he said. “Usually we sell to factories and they recycle them into plastic chips. But the price of chips has dropped so it’s had a knock-on effect on us.”
This area deals in domestic waste rather than imports, but Shi said every part of the industry had been affected.
Beijing dealers have taken a particularly hard hit. They stockpiled large quantities of recyclables because prices were soaring, but as the market began to soften, the Olympic security clampdown prevented trucks from entering the capital. The merchants could only watch as the value of their holdings plummeted.
“In a good year we can earn about 50,000 yuan (US$7,300) but this year we lost 200,000,” said Gong Rongchuan, 45, whose yard lies across the rutted alley from Shi’s.
“We came here more than 10 years ago and at the beginning we collected ourselves. Then we managed to start the business,” Gong said. “We were too poor to get loans but we managed to borrow 100,000-200,000 [yuan] from friends and relatives and we work from morning to night every day. But we haven’t paid them all back because of our losses.”
Minter says the predicament is typical.
“People would borrow money from relatives and buy a container of scrap and then throw all that money back in and reinvest it. Great if it goes up — but the moment it starts slipping, especially if it’s slipping 20 percent-30 percent, you’re finished,” he said.
Gong said: “Once we have sold all this stock we’ll leave. My son’s sorting it because we can’t afford workers any more. We haven’t figured out what to do next. We have seven people in the family and only 2.5 mu-3 mu [roughly 0.2 hectares] of farmland. It’s too many people and too little land, so even if we go home there’s not much we can do. We have both old and young to support.”
Like 80 percent of the merchants in this area, she comes from a single county, Gushi, in impoverished Henan Province.
“One of the officials came up here and cried when he saw how bad business was,” said another trader from Gushi.
The effects can be felt across China. Most of Gong’s customers were plastics recyclers in Wen’an, Hebei, where by one estimate 93 percent of income depends on the trade. Some are already bankrupt. Wen’an Dongdu Jiacheng Recycling Resources is clinging on. But Miss Han, a materials buyer, said all but three of the 26 production line workers had been sent home for the Lunar New Year holiday more than a month early.
There is no longer demand for plastic granules from nearby companies such as Hongkai Plastic Products, which made items such as bicycle handlebars. Its owner, Mr Zheng, has sent 20 workers home.
“My factory was hit by the economic crisis — it’s been closed for two months already,” he said. “We usually sell our products to a dealer and most of his business is exports. He didn’t give us any more orders.”
At a factory down the road, the response to queries was more brusque.
“We’ve already gone bust,” said a man, and hung up.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not
RSS