Disappearing Labour: Waste Politics in the Shadow of the Circular Economy

In her 2024 book Circular Ecologies, Amy Zhang reveals the exclusionary logic behind Guangzhou’s “circular economy.” She considers waste governance as a “circular ecology” woven together by the state, market, and scavengers. This article re-examines her ethnography through class analysis and provides a political economy critique. While Zhang’s concepts of “violence of circulation” and “green mystification” powerfully show how digitalisation and environmental discourse simultaneously include and exclude informal labourers, her analysis stops at describing their “disappearance” without asking who makes them disappear or who benefits. Her celebration of “beyond-human” experiments overlooks a retreat from public politics to private morality. Yet Zhang’s own fieldwork contains evidence of scavenger agency, which this article theorises as political subjectivity. The circular economy is not a technical problem but a problem of political economy; disappearing labour is not a system malfunction but how the system normally operates. Only by situating informal labourers’ structural position within the logic of capital accumulation can we grasp the class politics of Chinese environmental governance.