100 SOCIAL SCIENTIST view, and with what attitude. From the metaphysical point of view, waste cannot be used and should be gotten rid of. On the contrary, the materialist dialectical view holds that what is waste and what is not waste are relative terms. There is nothing in the world that is absolute waste. ^Waste55 under one condition may be valuable under different ones. Waste material left from one product can become good material for another product. After being transformed and utilized, ^waste material95 can become a product or a useful material.8 The problem thus becomes not one of disposal, but of multiple or comphrehensive use of a thing. Now here is an irony. The American aesthetic view is frequently bad for utilizing resources and for public health. In contrast, the Chinese position whispers not a word about aesthetics even when they are planting trees in cities. Yet they end up scoring high on all counts, including aesthetics. (Of course, one thing to keep in mind is that aesthetics is one thing to people who have known poverty and another thing entirely to people raised in luxury.) The Chinese are not unaware of aesthetic considerations. Rather they start from the other end—really the heart of the matter—and ask: what is the best use to which all our resources can be put? Were the Chinese to look at the concerns of the honest ecology movement in the US, and uncharacteristically venture a criticism, they would probably say: you have stood the problem on its head; turn it right end up and you have a chance to solve it. Two Lines We had encountered a contradictory attitude among Shenyang officials following the Liu Shao-chi line: that raising pigs and growing rice in an industrial city would dirty and foul the environment. But when it actually came down to industrial practices that were polluting air and water, they whistled a different tune. From being ostensibly concerned with questions of public health and aesthetics, they quickly turned into hard-nosed, no-nonsense ^economists95. Here are some examples of how these apparently contradictory positions reduce to the same error. In the Fushun No. 3 oil refinery, work under way on making use of waste was stopped on the pretext that it was ^not the job55 of the refinery to recover industrial waste. Influenced by the Liu line that ^profit comes first55 some people in the plant opposed treating waste water and recovering glauber salt from it, saying, ^The money we get from one ton of glauber salt isn't enough to buy the straw bags needed. It's not worth doing.55 (This waste water contained quantities of acid and soda, and adversely affected agriculture downstream.)4 In the medium rolling mill of Anshan iron and steel company 3 large amounts of exhaust heat from water-cooling pipes and chimneys of the reheating furnances were formerly let out unused. Under the