In what’s been dubbed the “toilet revolution,” the country is investing $290 billion over the next four years to upgrade 100,000 public toilets, according to Reuters. It’s all part of a grand plan to entice more foreign visitors, who accounted for nearly 11 percent of economic growth in 2015, according to the the National Tourism Administration (NTA), but who made China’s unhygienic restrooms one of their top complaints. The hope is that by 2020, those upgrades could further that growth by 1 percent—a small change until you consider that the total tourism spending for services could reach $1 trillion by then.
Public restrooms have long been a sore point for a country that boasts modern metropolises and picturesque hutongs. And the rapidly urbanizing China has seen many of such “revolutions.” Earlier this year, the NTA released new sanitation standards, which rated facilities on an A to AAA scale and pushed for more Western-style toilets as opposed to squat toilets.
This time, the effort is concentrated in the Rust Belt regions, where the national government is encouraging industrial cities to develop their tourism industry. Predominantly dependent on resources like steel and coal, many of these cities are now experiencing job shrinkage due to slumping demands and depleting resources. As Reuters notes, many depleted coal cities are already trying to turn defunct mines into parks.
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Many depend on public bathrooms, which in their barest forms are little more than pits in the ground that users squat over, sometimes separated by shoddy dividers. There may not be ventilation or running water, so the waste has to be manually pumped out, but not before the stench takes over.
Meanwhile, the ones in the heart of Beijing are pristine, even high-tech. It was only last year that the city introduced a public restroom that itself became a tourist attraction. It had personal TVs, charging stations, wi-fi, and even ATMs—all while a “soothing cello soundtrack” plays in the background. In fact, Beijing is where one of the first “toilet revolutions” began, dating back to the 1960s.
