Synopsis

While China's rise, and its immense challenges, commands world attention, less light has been shed upon the colossal problem of waste generated by a burgeoning population, expanding industry, and rapacious urban growth. Photographer Wang Jiuliang turns his lens upon the grim spectacle of garbage, excrement, refuse, and wreckage heaped upon the landscape that surrounds China's mega-metropolis, Beijing. Eking out a hazardous living within are the scavengers, mostly rural migrants, who struggle to maintain familial and cultural structures amid the bleakest of occupations. Wang shows the desecration of once-vital farmlands and rivers in the shadow of China's gleaming cities and planes and super-trains; the unholy cycle of construction's consumption and waste, and poignant images of the daily lives of scavengers who toil at their own peril.