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China prepares its new revolootion
Toilets a development indicator, so millions being spent
PALLAVI AIYAR
Posted online: Tuesday, November 16, 2004 at 0158 hours IST
BEIJING, NOVEMBER 15: Some 55 years after the Communist revolution, the Chinese government is pulling out all stops to foment a new kind of upheaval: ‘‘Toilet Revolution.’’
Despite the ultra-modern veneer that Beijing’s glittering skyscrapers and multi-laned highways give it, the majority of the city’s public toilets are little more than smelly holes in the floor. Municipal authorities want to change all that in time for the 2008 Olympics.
‘‘Toilets represent the level of development of a country or region,’’ says Yu Debin, deputy director of Beijing’s Municipal Bureau of Tourism. Yet, more than one-third of all tourist complaints in Beijing are toilet-related.
Assisting the mainland in its toilet revolution is the WTO, not the trade body that mulls on tariffs but the Singapore-based World Toilet Organisation whose mission it is to ‘‘continuously generate awareness of the importance of a good toilet environment.’’
The WTO will hold its 4th World Toilet Summit in Beijing between November 17 and 19 and is expected to attract over 150 washroom heavy weights from 19 countries, including academics, sanitation experts and toilet designers. The summit will feature workshops on hot topics like the ‘‘humanised toilet’’ and ‘‘toilets as tourism attraction’’.
Public toilets made their debut in the Middle Kingdom some 2000 years ago and the modern flush toilet first appeared in China in the 19th century. However, squat toilets remain the norm till today.Urban myth has it that when the People’s Liberation Army led by the Communists took over a city in 1949, a team of soldiers found a white porcelain basin-like container fixed on the bathroom floor of a residence vacated by an officer of the fleeing enemy. The soldiers decided to wash some rice in the ‘‘big bowl’’ before cooking. It all went wrong when one of the men decided to pull the rope attached to the cistern and the rice dissapeared. Several decades later, the majority of mainland public toilets remain flushless but numerous. Beijing alone has more than 8,000 public bathrooms.
There are no flushes and the mess piles up until evening, when a ‘‘pump truck’’ makes the rounds of the neighbourhoods, sucking up everything from the pits. Small wonder then that a multi-million dollar toilet renovation of the city’s public toilets is underway. According to Beijing municipal authorities, over $10 million a year will be spent till 2008 on transforming the city’s bathrooms into ‘‘luxurious lavatories.’’ The city has come up with a rating system of 1 to 4 stars for its public facilites and government figures show that the capital already has 88 four-star toilets.By the time of the Olympics, visitors will never be more than an 8-minute walk from a star-rated toilet.
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