Marketing the public toilets : a political economy analysis of changing state-business relations in 19th-century Hong Kong

Abstract

This study aims to understand changing state-business relations with a focus on their collaboration in the public toilet provision in nineteenth-century Hong Kong. From a political economy perspective of resources control, it is argued that economic transformation based on land-centred capitalism made Chinese landowners with huge land resources critically important in sustaining toilet services. More specifically, this study examines the provision of privately-owned public toilets as related to land interests and the powers of the native business sector. The colonial state is not necessarily the providers of public services. There are implications for state-business relations and the restructuring of roles in a new economic reality. Such a study should also allow insights (how services are delivered in urban governance) deriving from the colonial Hong Kong case to be applied to the contemporary world-wide trends in outsourcing and privatization of services to business.

It was often assumed there is a hierarchical ordering of public roles and the public toilets were “naturally public”, a political representation of hygienic modernity provided by the colonial state. However, toilet services during early colonization in Hong Kong were in fact provided by big Chinese landowners and operated on a quasi-commercial basis. Nightsoil selling had been going on for centuries in China, but was commercialized by the British colonial state through the nightsoil auctioning system: nightsoil was sold at the highest bid. It had an apparently paradoxical effect of promoting nightsoil speculation; landowners leased their property as privately-owned public toilets for collecting nightsoil. The rental return was twenty per cent higher than residental return. Serving as nightsoil collection points, these toilets were ineffective but they survived into the early twentieth century. This type of toilet was neither public nor private or both public and private: private property serving a public function in the hands of the native business sector. This study suggests that the stronghold of land resources allowed Chinese landowners to transcend the binary and vertically integrated colonizer-colonized and public-private boundaries, complicating their relationship and challenging the hierarchy of colonial state. Three major approaches are used: first, land-centred capitalism provided a source of power, granting landowners a privileged structural position in colonial policies; second, the institutionally created high land prices and the nightsoil auctioning system offered new opportunities to landowners to get involved in the public toilet market, largely reshaping toilet development; third, control of land resources empowered landowners to sustain privately-owned public toilets based on land interests and power and consequently led to state-business collaboration in the provision of toilets allowing business to play a greater role in colonial policy.

The study challenges the assumption of binary relations and hierarchical public roles that state and business in zero-sum competition. Moreover, the economic and political dynamics of land-centred capitalism that restructured relations and roles leading to collaboration in the public toilet provision are discussed. Second, a combined approach considers the constraints and facilitations associated with land powers to understand the ways landowners strategically sustained such a provision and leading to greater influence over colonial policies.