Xi Jinping wants China to have better toilets

These areUN hard times for many local governments in China. Slowing economic growth and a teetering property market make it hard for them to service their massive debts. Some even struggle to pay public-sector workers. But instructions from Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, are hard to ignore. In Guangyuan, a city in the south-western province of Sichuan, officials met last month to study his edicts relating to lavatories. Eradicating noxious facilities and building hygienic ones is a goal that Mr Xi heartily champions. In 2015 he called for a “toilet revolution”. Political resolve helped China to create the world’s largest high-speed rail network in a matter of years. With sanitation, however, politics can get in the way.A revolution is much needed. Toilets in China are often rudimentary, especially in the countryside where until recent years it was common to squat on concrete slabs over a pit, with the waste left to accumulate for use as fertiliser or even consumption by pigs. Long before Mr Xi began using the term, officials and global health experts had been calling for a toilet revolution in poor countries to curb the spread of parasites and diseases such as diarrhoea and malaria. China had been making progress. In 1993 fewer than 8% of China’s rural residents had access to toilets deemed sanitary by the government. By 2014 the proportion was about three-quarters. But the bar was low: even though septic tanks had become more common, few toilets were flush-types and many were still foul.