By focusing on Guangzhou's street-vending policy transformation, this article explores how exclusionary practices of urban politics in China are undermined by those who it seeks to exclude and the progressive political climate that questions the exclusionary framework. The exclusion of street vendors in Guangzhou has been led by the National Sanitary City campaign as a revanchist project. It has been discovered that while the exclusionary strategies are rendered difficult to operate due to the resistance of street vendors who develop a flexible, individualized and small-scale activism to maintain their livelihoods, the discourse of social harmony at national level has driven local authorities to seek alternatives expected to alleviate social resistance and address people's livelihoods. However, rather than an overturn of the punitive framework, an ambivalent approach, recognized in a recent critique of revanchism, has been adopted to mediate the tension between the needs to retain attractive city images and address the livelihoods of the poor in Chinese cities.
The proliferation of urban street vending in developing countries is generally viewed as being as a result of unemployment. Using a theoretical approach based on mainstream perspectives on informal employment and first-hand material from 200 semi-structured vendor interviews in Guangzhou, we challenge this view by revealing the heterogeneity of people’s motivations for participating in street vending in present-day China. Various types of labourers, including wage workers, farmers, the unemployed and small businesspeople, participate in street vending with diverse motivations, but in a common attempt to improve their livelihoods. Such motivations are driven both by the labourers’ responses to multiple socio-economic forces including unemployment, the low quality of waged jobs, rural poverty, the difficulties of maintaining a formal business and the poor remuneration of jobs in cities, and by their desire to achieve autonomy and flexibility. Street vending is mainly argued to be an effective strategy of ordinary labourers to cope with the unfavourable situations they face amidst socio-economic transformation. It should not be seen as a problem, but a potential part of the solution to the problems arising from socio-economic transformation in post-reform China.
Based on the increasing pressure on the water environment, this study aims to clarify the overall status of wastewater discharge in China, including the spatio-temporal distribution characteristics of wastewater discharge and its driving factors, so as to provide reference for developing “emission reduction” strategies in China and discuss regional sustainable development and resources environment policies. We utilized the Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) method to analyze the characteristics of the spatio-temporal distribution of the total wastewater discharge among 31 provinces in China from 2002 to 2013. Then, we discussed about the driving factors, affected the wastewater discharge through the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) method and classified those driving factors. Results indicate that: (1) the total wastewater discharge steadily increased, based on the social economic development, with an average growth rate of 5.3% per year; the domestic wastewater discharge is the main source of total wastewater discharge, and the amount of domestic wastewater discharge is larger than the industrial wastewater discharge. There are many spatial differences of wastewater discharge among provinces via the ESDA method. For example, provinces with high wastewater discharge are mainly the developed coastal provinces such as Jiangsu Province and Guangdong Province. Provinces and their surrounding areas with low wastewater discharge are mainly the undeveloped ones in Northwest China; (2) The dominant factors affecting wastewater discharge are the economy and technological advance; The secondary one is the efficiency of resource utilization, which brings about the unstable effect; population plays a less important role in wastewater discharge. The dominant driving factors affecting wastewater discharge among 31 provinces are divided into three types, including two-factor dominant type, three-factor leading type and four-factor antagonistic type. In addition, the proposals aimed at reducing the wastewater discharge are provided on the basis of these three types.
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