Mao’s Toilet: The Politics of Feeding the People in Socialist China (the 1950s-70s)

Night soil, also known as humanure, is an ancient farming skill of recycling human waste and an evolving social practice in the Chinese context. I, as a dirty ethnographer, follow in my mother’s footsteps, who experienced the hard but vivid work on manure in Mao’s era, to explore the changes in science and technology related to humanure. I also question the other historical condition to rethink Marxian critiques of social metabolism. I will introduce the notion of the “socialist toilet system”, which emerged from the combination of two Maoist mobilisation efforts aimed at improving agricultural productivity and environmental hygiene. The system involved valuing all sorts of waste through the workpoint system, designing new hygienic toilets, and politically articulating the “old” within the Cultural Revolution to renew a circular form of rural-urban interdependence. As a result, a new set of science and technology related to humanure was developed during Mao’s era. This system became the other politics of feeding people in the Cold War context, in contrast to the US’s Green Revolution, which promoted modern agriculture in other Asian societies. Through this common but overlooked practice, I argue for a historically grounded relationship between humans and soils that cannot be simply flushed and forgotten.