As Beijing Sheds Its "Non-Capital Functions," the Inscrutable Life of Wang Weishan, a Scrap Collector at "Dongpi"
What, in the end, governs a person's life?
What, in the end, governs a person's life?
Editor's note:
Events come fragmented, flare into trends, and are forgotten just as fast — and in an age like this, remembering is worth more. We want to be people who remember. "Stories of 2017" is one of QDaily's most important series of the year.
Wang Weishan was the youngest child in his family. The baby of the house gets all the small joys childhood offers — petted, indulged, handed the best food first, before his older brothers, his sisters, and the grown-ups.
Wang Weishan is now 46, living alone in Beijing.
He is thin and not tall, and wears thick glasses. The frames are slender and grip his cheeks tightly; the lenses, he says, are over 2,000 degrees. He likes to joke around. The impulse behind the jokes is the one that makes you grab a friend you've run into and tussle, hands and feet waving with delight — the way boys do in junior high. The joking is pure play, and the happiness it brings is immediate.
When he smiles he opens his mouth wide and the wrinkles on his face fan out; the thin frames pinch his cheeks tighter still, and the two thick, blurry lenses peer out like a pair of searchlights locking onto his eyes from far off.
Wang Weishan lives in an underground passage. It is roomy, with sloping ramps on either side wide enough for a vehicle to drive straight down and park. Besides carrying foot traffic across the road, it once served as a place for cargo trucks to park, though none stop there now.
Every morning around five or six, Wang Weishan gets up, leaves the passage for the Dongding Garment Wholesale Market, washes up there, buys breakfast and eats it, and starts his day's work.
In the morning he scavenges cardboard, plastic sheeting, woven sacks, and drink bottles inside Dongding Market. From noon to one he collects bottles outside the zoo area across the way. He keeps a fixed loop: Dongding — the zoo bus hub — the zoo subway station — outside the zoo grounds — another passage a little farther off — back to Dongding, one neat circle.
The woman selling boxed lunches at the Dongding entrance sets a meal aside for him in advance and keeps it however late he turns up. After he has eaten, Wang Weishan rests for about an hour, sitting in the market's stairwell, leaning against the wall, dozing. Then the afternoon shift — still inside Dongding, still after cardboard, plastic sheeting, woven sacks, and bottles.
After five, he goes back to the spot outside the market where he keeps his things and sorts the cardboard, sheeting, and bottles into bulging, person-high woven sacks. The spare sacks, bundled up, sell by the piece too.
Between six and six-thirty he unlocks the three-wheeled cart chained behind the Dongding building, loads the packed recyclables, and takes them to a buyer one or two bundles at a time — two or three trips in all.
Set out west from the road in front of Dongding Market, pass one traffic light, turn twice, ride about five minutes, and you come to two men with money pouches at their waists standing in a small alley, a large truck loading up beside them. The zoo area has several scrap dealers; they come around in the evening, and every day they fill a whole truck.
Once he has sold his haul, Wang Weishan locks the cart where it stands, returns to his storage spot beside Dongding, sweeps the ground clean, and pushes his old crossbar bicycle back to the passage. His quilt is strapped to the rear rack; the basket holds the medicine he has to take and his odds and ends; a few bags hang from the handlebars with spare clothes, the half-box of rice left from lunch, and the beer bottles he'll cash in that night…
By now it's about seven. He parks the bicycle in the passage and locks it, takes the previous day's beer bottles to the corner shop to buy a fresh beer, then goes for cold dishes — sometimes a small bag of braised peanuts and two or three chicken feet; sometimes the cold-dish vendors don't dare come out, so he buys a bag of peanuts and two chicken sausages from the corner shop instead.
Back in the passage, he drinks his beer with the peanuts and cold dishes, then finishes the rice left from lunch. Ask him when he is happiest and he says: at mealtimes. Because of his epilepsy he doesn't dare drink baijiu, so he drinks beer. In hot weather it cools him down. In cold weather it leaves him shivering, but that's all right too.
After eating he tidies up, sets the bottles aside, makes a trip to the restroom, and then either strolls the plaza in front of the Beijing Exhibition Center or gets ready to sleep.
Every day runs this way. Barring something unusual, you can find him exactly where he ought to be at any hour. Laid out like this his life sounds maddeningly minute — but think how much you have to plan for an ordinary trip away from home, and you can see why his days read so granular. He is, in effect, always away from home. In a sense, the garment wholesale market took in and sustained that life on the road.
He first came to Beijing in 1991, at twenty, following his older brother to sell jianbing guozi (savory crepes) outside the east gate of Renmin University of China. It was an outdoor stall, but even that meant renting a business license — over a thousand yuan a month in rent, about a thousand a month in earnings. After food and lodging, over six or seven years he still saved up several tens of thousands of yuan. In 1997, road work started near Renmin University and street vending was banned. The business stopped, he had nothing to do, and before he knew it Wang Weishan was drinking heavily every day.
Late in 1997 he fell while drunk and was left with epilepsy. After he fell ill he went back to Anhui, and the girlfriend he'd met in Beijing left him. He lived with his elderly father in the old family house in Anhui. For several years he felt restless. He'd grown used to Beijing, and Beijing felt free, so he came back.
He returned in 2005 and went to the "Zoo."
Besides the zoo where you go to see animals, "Zoo" also means the Zoo garment wholesale district. To map it onto Wang Weishan's twenty-odd-meter passage: to the west sat the already-shuttered Wanrong Tiandi and Shiji Tianle garment markets and the still-operating Dongding and Tianhe Baima markets; to the east lay the Beijing Exhibition Center plaza, with the already-closed Julong garment market beneath it.
It was only because the markets were closing one after another that the passage was ordered to stop holding goods and vehicles.
The Beijing Zoo garment wholesale district appeared in the mid-1980s as clothing stalls along the road. In the 1990s, the Tianle and Dongding markets were the first to be built up, and the trade clustered here. Through the 2000s came Tianhao Cheng, Jin Kailide, Shiji Tianle, and the Julong garment markets…
Everyone who came to buy wholesale was a local or out-of-town small vendor. Order sizes were modest, but the crowds were enormous — over 100,000 people a day on average, more than the peak daily attendance at Shanghai Disneyland over the 2017 Golden Week. This was a spot-goods market; beyond the deals there was the pressure of inventory and shipping.
The passages went up as the garment markets boomed. The one Wang Weishan lives in took ten years to build; he moved here from another passage nearly ten years ago.
In recent years, though, the government formed a new view of the place. It judged the garment wholesale markets a "low-end" industry — a non-capital function — and called for moving them out of Beijing.
In 2013, the government first signaled that the Zoo garment markets should relocate. Wang Ning, then Party secretary of Beijing's Xicheng District, said the 20,000-plus garment wholesalers in the zoo area brought Xicheng roughly 60 million yuan in benefit a year, while the government spent more than 100 million yuan to manage them; the low-end trade should be moved out in orderly fashion and the district's quality raised. Plans to overhaul Dongpi were already under study.
A year or so later, Beijing Vice Mayor Li Shixiang put a finer point on "low-end": in 2013, Dongpi's total tax and fee revenue came to 13.27 million yuan. That meant the 60 million yuan in "benefit" the government kept citing covered not just taxes but other returns.
Against 20,000 wholesale merchants and 30,000 workers, the figure does sound meager — but the government plainly left out the workers' incomes, the sales volumes, and the jobs and wealth the district created. Lu Ming — author of 《大国大城》 (Great Power, Big City) and a distinguished professor at the Antai College of Economics and Management at Shanghai Jiao Tong University — argues that the government should measure benefit by "the total income and total output of economic activity"; even on a narrower measure, it should at least count total profit, the net income that includes every worker's earnings.
Soon enough, in January 2015, Dongpi's Tianhao Cheng market was the first to close. Under the plan, Tianhao Cheng would become the Baolan Financial Innovation Center: far fewer workers, far higher output. A square kilometer of land that once produced 60 million yuan in output would, after the conversion, produce 16 billion — this was a "financial innovation center" now, after all.
"If a place has low output per unit of land, and some industries get pushed out of the city during industrial upgrading, that in itself is not a problem. The real question is what role the market plays in this and what role the government plays. If the market is working, an industry with higher land output will outbid the old one for rent, and the government's role is at most to coordinate." Lu Ming's analysis was probably beyond what Wang Weishan could follow. For him, it just meant watching everything speed up again this year.
By now ten garment markets in the zoo area have closed. Dongding and Tianhe Baima are the only two left, and by year's end they are slated to shut too.
We first interviewed Wang Weishan in late August. Three wholesale markets were still standing then — Dongding, Tianhe Baima, and Shiji Tianle.
At four in the afternoon, many markets had closed for the day, but the streets were busy. Merchants buy their stock wholesale here and don't carry it off themselves; they hand it to the local logistics people to ship back. There are specialists for that, so the area stayed lively even after the markets shut. So Wang Weishan couldn't stop either — he was busy right along with everyone else. It was still summer, and the work made everyone move faster.
It began to rain. Wang Weishan didn't bother with an umbrella; he hurried along, watching the kids running and jumping in the street. "Kids don't use umbrellas — we'll be like the kids, no umbrella."
From 2005 to 2017, Wang Weishan's whole life in Beijing stayed inside this district. He had never once set foot in the zoo grounds — "Nothing much to see, it's just like that," he said. His life, his work, and most of his friends were all here.
Keeping his epilepsy in check takes medicine, which he buys at a pharmacy across from the Beijing Exhibition Center — carbamazepine at 9 yuan a bottle, a month's supply. In late October the pharmacy raised the price of some drugs, carbamazepine among them, to 15 yuan a bottle. He wouldn't accept it, convinced the price only went up in the evening and would drop back the next day. But the next day it was still 15. He said nothing more, didn't bother trying another pharmacy, and bought a bottle there all the same.
Back to late August. Two months earlier, Wanrong Tiandi had closed; with Julong, which had closed over a year before, both markets pressed against the two ends of Wang Weishan's passage were now gone.
About the future, Wang Weishan waved it off: "When the market closes I'll go home for a bit, then come back and see. There's still the zoo park here — I'll see if I can get by. If not, I'll look somewhere else. Still in Beijing, though. I'm used to it here."
At that point many vendors still couldn't make out the coming relocation order. The guess was that Tianhe Baima would close next. What Wang Weishan had heard was that Shiji Tianle would go first, right after National Day. He turned out to be right.
On September 9, Shiji Tianle posted a notice: it would close on October 6. By then many merchants had already ordered their autumn and winter stock from the factories. One month's notice to shut the market was far too tight — inventory would pile up, a serious problem for them. They gathered outside the market and made a scene; the police came at once. The next day everyone went quiet and set about preparing for the closure.
The security guards, cleaners, and scrap collectors at the Dongpi markets sometimes caught wind of a closing before the merchants did. The first group earned two or three thousand yuan a month here, three-something at most. The merchants could clear a million a year. Yet it was the first group, by comparison, who depended on this place to live.
By late September, the Shiji Tianle closure notice had been up for two weeks. The merchants were strikingly disciplined. An order-keeping vehicle stood every few paces outside the entrance, with staff patrolling without let-up; everything was moving along in order.
During that visit, Wang Weishan raised the chance of doing something different down the line: "We'll see when the time comes. There's not much I can do back home, the way I am — with nothing. I can't even farm anymore. I could as a teenager, not now. For one thing my eyes are bad, and for another, with this illness I could drop at any moment while I'm working."
He brought up August 30, when he'd had another seizure — to show what "drop at any moment" actually meant.
Just a week after our first interview, inside the passage: "I finished work and went over. Some kids nearby were playing cards. I kept not being able to sleep. Then it came on all at once. The top-left of my head knocked first, then I fell backward and cracked the back of my head on the ground. It bled. A few guards were there and got scared. They came over and told me to go to the hospital. I didn't really want to — nothing serious. But they insisted, so I went. One exam, over five hundred yuan. I thought: a whole week's work, gone for nothing. Just an exam, no stitches. The hospital gave me a topical for the cut. The medicine's still there in the bicycle basket. I never put it on. I keep forgetting."
When he first came back to Beijing the seizures were especially frequent — several times a day. Sometimes they hit while he was walking or cycling and he'd suddenly drop. It's much better now: if he's in good spirits and nothing sets him off, they come only once every two weeks or so.
But the triggers are unpredictable and hard to read; sometimes a tiny change is enough. One night he couldn't sleep for the mosquitoes, so he dabbed on a little Fengyoujing (medicated oil). The smell may have been too sharp — he had a seizure that night.
By October 11, Shiji Tianle had closed, its doors plastered with relocation slogans. A few stray merchants still came by to wrap up business, and passersby asked for directions — which markets were still open, and how to get there. A rope was strung across Shiji Tianle's entrance, put up by the management to warn people off, with a guard posted there.
Tianhe Baima and Dongding were all that was left. Dongding had already posted its notice: it would close on December 25. Tianhe Baima had posted nothing. Wang Weishan had overheard talk that Tianhe Baima might close first — perhaps as soon as November.
The clearing-out at Shiji Tianle would be done in a few days, after which the guards would be reassigned to other properties run by the same facilities company — where, not yet decided. But the guard standing at Tianle's entrance that day said he didn't plan to stay a guard. He meant to join a fellow villager at a printing plant inside the city. He thought it might be a better place to work.
He knew Wang Weishan, and these past few days had been trying to line him up a guard job at the zoo bus hub. "Twelve hours a day, watching the gate, watching the stuff. Three thousand a month, room and board included. But the food's bad — potatoes, cabbage, mushrooms every single day, never changes, it'd drive you crazy."
He wasn't sure it would work out. "I've tried to get him jobs and nobody wants him — introduced him twice already, took him there myself. The other guy said, you're fine, but I don't want him." This guard didn't know Wang Weishan's name; they weren't really close. But he liked to help people find work. He said he believed in the destiny readings in the I Ching — doing this kind of thing might earn him good fortune.
The guard chatted with gusto but wouldn't give his name. "I told him to go get his hair dyed — a dye's only 8 yuan, a cut only 5, just 13 yuan all in. But he wouldn't spend it. His hair's so patchy — wouldn't a dye help? Can't he shave the beard? I told him so. He said, 'Shave the beard — that'd hurt~.'"
Wang Weishan, catching part of the relayed talk, laughed as he ate. He said he didn't want the guard job — partly it wasn't free enough, partly his health wasn't up to twelve-hour shifts. He may not have noticed, but he gave this same answer to several different questions.
These past few days he hadn't actually been sleeping in the passage, though out of habit he still came back to eat there.
One day, with a "big meeting" approaching, the police came at night and took him from the passage. "First to the aid station — one night. The next day they took me to a shelter in Fangshan. They call it a shelter, but the sign said 'nursing home.' The front was for the old folks; we were in the back, in temporary rooms. I didn't like being shut in — how's that as good as being on my own? Earning my own money, eating on my own, spending on my own."
"They said it was comfortable, but it wasn't. Just eating, sleeping, watching TV. I hadn't been in a place like that for years. The last time was back in the nineties — got swept up in a raid on the room I was renting."
"Nobody hit anyone in there. They held me a week. At first they wouldn't let me go, and it got to me — breakfast was steamed buns and corn porridge, lunch was steamed buns and one dish, afternoon was steamed buns and a dish or two. The last two days were a bit better — noodles in the afternoon. All those steamed buns, I couldn't get them down, too dry. I couldn't take it, wanted to go home. The police were decent and agreed."
"At the train station the police said, board on your own. I thought it over — there was nothing to do back home just then, so I returned the ticket and came back. The refund went straight to the officer's bank card. He'd bought a fast train, no seat. Left in the afternoon, got there the next morning. Refunded a hundred-thirty-something of a hundred-fifty-something."
After he got back, he got someone's permission and moved into the stairwell of a residential building beside Dongding Market.
On October 25, Wang Weishan was still in that building. Many people there knew him; that day someone had given him a padded jacket and some scrap he could sell. He slept outside one family's door, and in the evening they'd invite him in to use the hot water. Wang Weishan declined — it felt out of place. He planned to wait until after the 28th to move back into the passage.
Dongding's closing was exactly two months off. Talking about the day's haul, he said his luck was bad. He hadn't found any cardboard all day, and the city had just banned collecting plastic sheeting to curb pollution, so there was nothing to sell from that either. The bad luck, Wang Weishan said, came from picking up a bottle of Coke that morning. The morning had been dreadful; by afternoon things picked up a little.
Asked during the interview whether he'd feel regret about leaving Beijing, he said: "Of course I would. I've been here so long, I'm used to it. The neighbors are all good — that alone — the old ladies in this building all greet me when they see me, they give me their scrap, won't take a cent. When the market's torn down and there's no work, I'll go home after the New Year. Rest up, talk it over with the family about what to do next. See if there's something to do back home."
His family had been urging him home; the talk of "the future" had come up as early as June, when he went back to renew his ID card. But in all our interviews, this was the first time he laid out the possibility in any detail.
He said his older brother and sister-in-law wanted him to get a disability certificate from the township government and then see if he could find work back home. His sister had also asked whether he wanted to come to her place — another county in Anhui — to look for work. "But with this illness — last year I worked under one of the old guys at Dongding for two weeks." The man hired plenty of people to collect scrap for him, relatives and outsiders alike — essentially a labor contractor. "A thousand yuan a month, but when I had a seizure they didn't want me anymore — didn't even pay my wages. I didn't chase him for it either. I just went back to collecting scrap inside Dongding Market."
"Honestly, there's no good option. While there's business to do, work to be had, I'd rather stay in Beijing a couple more years." Wang Weishan said that just a few days earlier another guard had offered to set him up — also a guard job, at some institution near Zizhuyuan that he hadn't quite figured out; not a garment market, two subway stops from the zoo area. He'd said yes. Then, on second thought, he hadn't dared go.
"I've been in Beijing so long I don't want to go home. One bottle of beer and I'm content — a little food, a bit of rice, that's enough. Back home I can't drink at all. Dad and my brother won't let me." At home he and his brother bicker too — the ordinary kind of quarrel between rural brothers. "Totally normal."
He said the one he loved most in the family was his little niece. She was born in Beijing; in the savory-crepe days, Wang Weishan looked after her when she was small. He calls her every two or three days — she works in their hometown now — and it's always him calling her.
Wang Weishan had earlier brought up his late grandmother. She doted on him, he said. He was weak as a child, and once he started school she kept telling him to sit up straight when he read and wrote, or his eyes would go bad. But he always lay flat across the desk to read and write; he turned nearsighted very young, and by the time he got his first pair of glasses on finishing junior high, his prescription was already over 1,000 degrees.
That day's interview — maybe because someone had again pushed him to get a haircut and a dye, and asked why he hadn't — after the meal, he said he was off to the Exhibition Center plaza for a haircut. He found a barber there, and besides the cut he had a shave too.
The barber wore a white coat. He opened a metal tin, drew out a small brush, worked it a few turns over a bar of soap, and swept it across Wang Weishan's face until it was all lather.
Before the cut, Wang Weishan told the barber again and again to cut the hair as short as he could and shave the face as clean as he could. The barber agreed readily and worked with an easy hand. He was the very barber the Shiji Tianle guard had mentioned.
It was evening, but the plaza was well-lit, bright enough to see by. Wang Weishan sat in the barber's folding chair with his face tensed, the muscles deliberately clenched as hard as they'd go. The barber read the situation exactly and coached him: "Just relax all the way, no need to tense up — that's the only way the stubble comes off." Wang Weishan didn't hear, or didn't listen, and kept his face rigid, straining to hold it the whole time. And then, quickly, the cut was done.
By now the plaza was full of people dancing. Wang Weishan walked straight through the dancers toward the passage on the far side, running one hand over his hair, then over his face, checking the barber's work as he went.
Earlier "Stories of 2017" entries include:
The sudden death of a viral bakery and six people's wretched summer | "Stories of 2017" ①
Cover image by Shan Chaitongji, cropped
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.