Sanitation & Health
Beijing's Hutong are the traditional single-storey houses. Like rabbit warrens, they grew organically in random clusters. Beijing must have been a fascinating labyrinth when it was formed only of Hutong.
China is often accused of having destroyed the Hutong areas. This is nonsense. Within the second circle of Beijing alone there are miles and miles of Hutong. You could walk for days and see only a fraction of the Hutong there.
A visitor to these areas will quickly notice that almost every street that is wide enough to accommodate one will have a (relatively) modern chemical public toilet. These toilets are not there for the convenience of tourists taking a stroll in picturesque old Beijing. They are there because many of the dwellings have no sanitation of their own.
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Although the sign is in English, the chemical toilets to be seen all over the Hutong areas are not there for the convenience of passing tourists.
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Along with the lack of sanitation, two other characteristics of old Hutong are overcrowding – the average is perhaps 10-12m2 per family, and pollution – the only source of heating for many Hutong homes in the winter is individual coal fires.
Overcrowding, poor sanitation, and pollution are a recipe for disease. Diseases do not confine themselves to the areas where they break out. During the Olympics there was a massive epidemic of mycoplasmic pneumonia among Beijing schoolchildren, infecting hundreds of thousands. Parents queued for hours to pay for their child's antiseptic drip, and sat with their children in groups of forty or fifty in hospital rooms measuring no more than 20m2.
China is not in a position to provide western levels of healthcare for its population – if the country spent as much per capita on health as the UK spends on the NHS it would cost 40% of total GDP. The Government therefore has all the more responsibility to take what measures it can to avoid epidemics in the first place. One such measure is the removal of slums in large cities.
COHRE have nothing to say, anywhere in any of their reports, on the subject of sanitation and health.