In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has spent huge amounts of money on a nationwide “toilet revolution,” but how effective is it today? In Shenyang City, Liaoning Province, more than 80,000 toilets were reportedly built with hundreds of millions of yuan (RMB) in the past few years, but now more than 50,000 have been abandoned, prompting criticism from the outside world.
The “toilet revolution” was first proposed by Xi Jinping in 2015. Until 2017, a total of 20 billion yuan was spent across the mainland to renovate 68,000 public toilets, and at the 2019 sessions, Han Changfu, the Communist Party’s minister of agriculture and rural affairs, said he planned to spend 7 billion yuan to implement a “toilet revolution” in 30,000 villages on the mainland.
Several years have passed, has the CCP’s ‘toilet revolution’ been successful? A few days ago, the mainland media revealed the chaos of toilet reform in rural Shenyang.
The Chinese Communist Party’s official media Xinhua News Agency reported on January 27 this year that Shenyang City had invested hundreds of millions of yuan in financial resources to promote the “toilet revolution” between 2016 and 2020. Due to the large design flaws and poor engineering quality of the toilet reform in some local places, it has caused serious resource mismatch and waste.
In the past five years, Shenyang has reportedly invested more than 80,000 toilets that have been rebuilt with over 100 million yuan, and more than 50,000 have been abandoned.
According to the report, a pair of villagers in their eighties living in the village of Xiawanzi in Liaocheng District, Shenyang, use iron buckets for “convenience” in Shenyang, where it is about minus 20 degrees Celsius. The couple of villagers, who are over 80 years old, use iron buckets to “facilitate” at night when it is too cold, so they have to ‘facilitate’ in the house and come out to pour. The villagers said.
Some of the villagers’ toilets were installed directly opposite the stove, without any cover. The villagers said, “When the temperature is low, the toilet will be blocked by ice, so we can’t boil hot water every Time we go to the toilet and flush it first. I have to flush myself when I’m done, so I’m not asking for trouble.
According to the report, except for a few villagers who occasionally use the renovated toilets in summer, most of them only use them as storage rooms, and some people privately dig out the plastic barrels in the toilet pits and use them as scrap for money.
In addition, there is corruption in some of the toilet renovation projects. It has been reported that since 2019 to date, the government subsidy rate for rural toilet reform in Shenyang is 4,500 yuan for each indoor toilet and 3,500 yuan for outdoor toilets. However, many villagers reflected that the subsidy handed out by the village was only 1,500 yuan, and some could not even receive the money.
In this regard, mainland netizens criticized, “This is a labor of the people and a loss of money. It’s not practical! It’s a waste of money and time. It’s a waste of money and time.” “It’s taxpayers’ money! Should there be accountability? The government’s performance has also been shown, and the wallet has also been enlarged, so let’s investigate. “It’s just a way to get money for a project. “The money was allocated and then left alone. “Look into the officials.
According to a BBC report in March last year, a historian with experience of living in rural areas in northern Jiangsu said that since 2015, some residents in rural areas in northern Jiangsu have received bidet toilet equipment from the organization to encourage villagers to renovate their huts. However, the villagers are responsible for the construction of supporting facilities and drainage systems. All the conversions required several thousand to ten thousand yuan, which many farmers simply could not afford, resulting in the toilets being discarded at the end of the village lanes.
Later, rural areas in northern Jiangsu Province to the villagers instead of squatting toilets, but due to the rural outhouses are mostly outdoors, the equipment supporting the downpipe is very easy to freeze in the winter, resulting in broken pipes. So farmers can only use the squatting toilet as an ornament, placed during the leaders’ inspections, and taken down when in use, becoming a “face-saving project”.
The report said that since the promotion of the “toilet revolution”, local governments of the Communist Party of China have been competing with each other to create “five-star bathrooms”. There are reports that Chongqing, Qinghai and other cities have built toilets costing nearly 1 million yuan.
The mainland media has reported that in some villages and towns in Anhui, Henan, Shandong and Jiangsu, the toilets that have been renovated do not work well or cannot be used, and the toilets have been left idle for a long time, becoming “ornamental”. Some places even rural toilet renovation for “to cope with the inspection” and so on.
The report said that in Hefei City, Anhui Province, Feidong County, Shitang Township, more than 10 farmers who have completed the transformation of toilets, found that none of the toilets can be used properly.
A commentary article said, “The reason for the chaos of rural toilet reform is inseparable from the lack of responsibility and accountability of the relevant departments, their drifting style and prominent formalism. In the rural areas where toilets are most lacking, a large number of ‘awkward toilets’ have been built that farmers cannot afford to use and are not comfortable using. The “toilet revolution” seems to have become more of a performance show.
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