Throwback Thursday: The Toilet Revolution That Never Was

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Throwback Thursday takes a look back into Beijing's past, using our 12-year-strong blog archives as the source for a glance at the weird and wonderful stories of Beijing's days gone by.

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Five years ago we brought you a story about Beijing’s ambitious, if not slightly outlandish plans to equip the city’s public toilets with a range of amenities including free wifi, charging stations for mobile devices and electric vehicles, ATMs, flat-screen TVs, and medical devices to check blood pressure, heart rate, and urinalysis. 

The program, dubbed the “Toilet Revolution” and launched by Beijing’s Municipal Environmental Sanitation Department was nicknamed “the Fifth Space,” suggesting that after the family space, workspace, social space, and cyberspace, toilets were the last frontier in need of modernizing. At the time of writing, a number of facilities in Fangshan had been given the royal makeover, with plans to upgrade another 57,000 toilets across the entirety of China over the following three years. 

According to People’s Daily, the idea was simple: “In most people’s mind, the restroom is a dirty and smelly place. However, in the future, the public restrooms in Beijing will not only have the basic function as a toilet but will provide a series of public services, from paying utilities to charging mobile phones.” Can’t argue with that!

People eagerly await their turn to pee... or charge their phone... or pay their bills? We really don't know

Making good on their promises, in April 2016, we again informed you that the Municipal Commission of City Administration and Environment announced that by years’ end, 700 public toilets were to be given temperature controls and new “water-saving technologies.” Unfortunately, however, only about 100 bathrooms would be given the highly anticipated space-age treatment. What’s more, the administration further conceded that by the end of 2018, at least 200-300 facilities in the city’s hutongs probably wouldn’t see any upgrades at all.Things went a bit silent until December 2017, when China Daily ran the headline, Beijing Upgrades 500 Public Toilets. The big takeaway? “A public toilet in North Hepingli Street in Dongcheng District has just been renovated. It is now clean and odor free.” It sounded less like a renovation and more like a visit from the resident custodian, for which we were no less grateful.

Nevertheless, it was a far cry from wifi-enabled toilets with charging stations, flat-screen TVs, and urinalysis equipment. Instead, the plan was seemingly being reduced to heating systems, deodorization, and water-saving technologies.

"I wet myself because the guy in front of me wanted to catch the last three minutes of the game."

One year later, however, and three years after the initial three-year-plan was enthusiastically unveiled, Global Times got in on the hype with their article, Beijing to Upgrade Hundreds of Public Toilets. Still, no mention of the fabled bathrooms. 

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At this point, it became painfully clear that the city had basically flushed their plans to bring the latrine into the 21st century – even granting them the fact that the 57,000 toilets were to be spread throughout China – as we were greeted with yet another mediocre and disappointing announcement that Beijing planned to upgrade 800 facilities in 2019. Interestingly, this time the impetus was to “improve the sanitary conditions to attract more tourists,” and was said to employ a “method of ‘Designing, Budgeting, and Reviewing each toilet.’” We’re not sure how many wiz kids (pun intended) it took to come up with this master plan, but we hoped it was more than had been on the case since 2015, as again, the idea was to use, “antifreeze technology, heat preservation, deodorization, and water-saving to solve bad odor inside public toilets.” Yeah, we’ve heard that before.

Some bathrooms do feature fine art. This gem was spotted in a women's toilet off Beiluoguxiang

Perhaps sensing that the public was growing skeptical of their abilities to make wash closet comfort a universal right, Gao Xiang, head of the Dongcheng District Environmental Health Service Center said that aside from the 237 toilets that had been renovated up to that point, “In the next three years, all toilets in Dongcheng will be renovated to be above Beijing’s average level,” and that the renovation of 800 public toilets would be deemed a “priority task” going into 2019. 

And this imposing castle was for the men

And now, here we are, one week out from Dec 2020 amidst a veritable dearth of toilet-related headlines. Maybe it’s down to COVID-19, or the fact that most people pay their utilities via WeChat now and no longer need an ATM post-potty visit. One thing is for certain though, most bathrooms in the city still smell god awful, and save for a few highlights like facial recognition toilet paper dispensers at the Temple of Heaven, most people I’ve spoken to are yet to see TVs or charging stations in the bathroom. On the upside, we are getting a platform on which to rate Chaoyang’s public restrooms, so hurray for that? Unfortunately, however, if your phone happens to die mid-review, don’t count on finding a charging station anywhere nearby.  

Images: salzberg24.at, The Beijing News, Edna Avila, Drew Pittock

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