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Accepted Paper:
Rebuilding practices and fluidity: an ethnography of water infrastructures in North China
Yuan Zhang
(University of Oxford)
This paper examine the afterlives of the recent state-led 'Toilet Revolution' aiming to modernise rural toilets in China. I suggest how grassroot renovations of water infrastructures, focused on daily convenience and nature-based fluidity, challenge a linear demarcation between private and public.
Paper long abstract:
In 2015, the Chinese government launched a nation-wide 'Toilet Revolution' aiming at improving sanitary conditions of rural pit latrines all over China. Similar to other cases of water infrastructures in post-socialist context (Schwenkel 2015), the Toilet Revolution was preoccupied by the pursuit of hygiene and modernity. The Toilet Revolution, dating back to the early-twentieth-century pursuit of 'hygienic modernity' (Rogaski 2004), emphasises privatisation of human waste - that is, villagers should take responsibility of their own dirt.
Drawing on ethnographic research in Xuhao Village, Shanxi, North China from 2021 until 2023, this paper analyses an unexpected phenomenon rising in my field. Rather than using septic tanks and ceramic sitting toilets distributed by the local government, many villagers decided to put them aside or installed but never used them at all. Some villagers built their own indoor water pipes and sewage systems, allowing wastewater to flow underground to an abandoned well or to the edge of a cliff. As I argue, the gap between the state-led movement and grassroot reactions shows that the modernity-focused ideal has deviated from villagers' daily concerns. What mattered to the villagers was convenience in hygienic practices and fluid connections to earth and nature, instead of an abstract notion of hygiene and a clear boundary between private waste and public environment. These embodied, fluid construction practices need to be studied. My paper questions the dynamic of top-down transformations versus active grassroot reactions.