The need to engage with Joshua Goldstein's Remains of the Everyday: A Century of Recycling in Beijing may not be apparent at first. For anyone interested in understanding China's modern waste recycling challenges, there are a plethora of writings on the subject that have appeared since around 2017. A fair share of this surge in academic engagement can be attributed to the emphasis and attention that the central government and Xi Jinping himself have dedicated to matters of waste management, the circular economy, ecological civilization and zero-waste cities. Given that context, Goldstein's publication is very timely as it captures the scientific and political zeitgeist at a critical stage. Yet, far from replicating what has become the commonplace canon (recycling performance analyses, formalistic modelling, etc.), Goldstein's work, which arguably constitutes the most encompassing analysis of recycling in Beijing and by extension urban China to date, offers something decisively different.

In contrast to the dominant analyses from the engineering and economic fields, Goldstein tackles Beijing's recycling challenge from a historical perspective with a political-economical toolbox that gets as close as is possible to recycling practitioners and the (discarded) material. The result is a thorough exploration of recycling practices over the past 108 years, which reveals the cause of, and solution to, one of China's most pressing environmental woes. The author's main argument is that part and parcel of the challenge are Beijing's ubiquitous informal recyclers: while their profit-oriented handling of discarded post-consumer materials has significantly contributed to rendering urban Beijing more liveable, the informal nature of their operations and their effective evasion of official control have put them at odds with the municipal government. Goldstein skilfully depicts how this contest emerged, was perpetuated and has been further amplified over the last ten years, and what that means for those involved: Beijing's residents are, for most of the periods studied here, plagued by either a lack of or overly coercive waste management regimes; informal recyclers, despite occasionally being able to accumulate profit and economic status from buying and selling recyclables, are repeatedly pushed into the realm of illegality and denounced as “low-life” (di suzhi) and “low-value population” (diduan renkou) (p. 225); last but not least, the Beijing government repeatedly falls short of developing effective recovery systems as it loses out to informal competition.

There are no shortcomings, however, when it comes to Goldstein's analytical technique and proposed solutions to the challenge. From the outset of the book, he outlines the contribution of the informal recycling sector to Beijing's material economy and highlights the severe consequences of Beijing's repeated inability to develop viable cooperation mechanisms with recyclers (p. 222). The author meticulously dissects the government–recycler conflict by consistently applying a tripartite analytical framework. Over three parts (covering the Republican, Mao and Reform eras), encompassing eight chapters, the author unveils (a) the mechanisms behind the emergence and evolution of informal recycling systems, (b) how the state subsequently strives to harness and control such bottom-up dynamics through formal rules and (c) the responsive strategies of recyclers to work around, bend, mould and dismantle this regulatory corset.

The narrative begins by introducing the reader to the nightsoil recycling industry (essentially rendering human effluvia into agricultural fertilizer) and the formation of powerful recovery networks that held sway over Beijing's hygienic wellbeing (chapter one). Recycling proceeded with time and extended to less contagious domains, which were manifested in the multitude of second-hand market trading outlets and the restoration of otherwise lost material and product values (chapter two). Whereas Beijing municipality had limited impact on the scrap and nightsoil trade during the Republican era, the political tone changed significantly under the new communist government: private material circulation systems were replaced with an administratively guided organization to supply the nascent industry with feedstock: “shit lords” were deposed and model “shit workers” were raised or demonized (pp. 82–85) depending on prevailing political interpretations (chapter three). Yet despite this superficially effective formalization, informal patterns centring on discard and secondary material trade proved impossible to eradicate: too pervasive were the needs of residents, state-owned enterprises and even official departments to overcome material shortcomings and improve living conditions by bartering and hoarding all kind of scraps and discards (chapters four and five). With the advent of economic reforms and a demise of official control over recycling, the doors reopened to informal recyclers, allowing them to rise again. Economic growth entailed secondary material demand, producing stories of individual wealth and “junk kings,” adverse environmental side effects and ever-growing concerns within the government (chapter six). In its final section, the book turns to the present period, and Goldstein provides evidence of the intensifying formal–informal recycling dynamics that result in increasingly pervasive crackdowns (chapter seven) and renewed attempts to substantially eradicate informal recycling from Beijing and China (chapter eight).

In conclusion to these final chapters Goldstein, resorting to his analytical framework, comes up with a tentative prediction on how Beijing's recycling dynamic might unfold in the future (p. 261–63). While I leave it to you to read the Remains of the Everyday and its conclusive assessment, it is worth noting the high quality of source materials on which this finding rests. Apart from newspaper articles, leaflets and secondary literature, the work includes and gains much from Goldstein's close engagement with archival documents, documented oral histories from personal contacts interviewed repeatedly over a decade – notably the couple Ms. and Mr. X (pp. 175–265) – and his personal research collected over 20 years from the field in Beijing, Wen'an (Hebei) and Guiyu (Guangzhou). Through the unique analytical engagement with so-far unseen materials, Remains of the Everyday significantly contributes to the state of research on Beijing's modern history, urban governance, environmental policy, formal–informal economic dynamics and resource recovery. This broad topical coverage hence renders the book appealing to scholars of modern China leaning towards human geography, urban historiography and political economy.