Street Politics: Street Vendors and Urban Governance in China

Abstract

Conflicts between urban street vendors and city regulators have become a common urban sight in Chinese cities today. This paper considers how visions of modern urban streets and sidewalks have helped to generate increasingly restrictive policies on street vending and spurred new forms of urban regulation and policing. While mostly an everyday routine of Chinese city life, the resulting vendor–chengguanconflicts dramatize state power in public and carry the latent danger of crowd violence in response. In particular, aggressive policing of highly visible city streets can at times produce a volatile “politics of the street” involving episodes of vendor resistance and even dramatic expressions of bystander solidarity which challenge these street-level expressions of state power.

Who Governs the 'Ungovernable'? Examining Governing Relations in Urban Informality

“…By ungovernable, some authors have viewed informality as "the uncontrollable dark aspect of the cities" (Kapsali & Tsavdaroglou, 2014, p. 3) and "a wild zone of the urban imagination… beyond the reach of human agency or any realistic prospects of improvement" (Gandy, 2005, p. 38). Such a dystopian framing masks the state role in informal economy and entrenches the dominant dualist paradigm (Geertz, 1963;Hanser, 2016;Rukmana, 2011;Santos, 1979;Sethuraman, 1981), which has long promoted a dichotomous view of the formal and informal processes.…”

“…In the Philippines, while there has been some degree of political accommodation of street hawkers, there are national laws prohibiting vending activities in public spaces like streets and sidewalks (Etemadi, 2004;Recio, 2010). In China, the 'global city' and modern space aspirations of urban leaders have resulted in abusive policing-measures and violent encounters between street vendors and the chengguan, the enforcers of municipal policies (Hanser, 2016). In Chengdu, the city street appearance served as "an important indicator of the city's well-being" (Wang, 2003, p. 133) and police enforced policies on "hygiene, traffic and commercial activity on the street, including where and when street vendors could operate" (Hanser, 2016, p. 6).…”

“…While the prevalent perspective highlights the contrasting features between formality and informality (Flock & Breitung, 2016;Geertz, 1963;Hanser, 2016;Rukmana, 2011;Santos, 1979;Sethuraman, 1981), the alternative view contends that these two constitute an interlocking system (Dovey, 2012;McGee, 1973;Portes, 1983;Roever, 2016;Stavenhagen, 1965). These divergent ideas affect, and are manifested in, policies on urban informality, particularly in the context of street hawking in the global South.…”

“…In street vending literature, agency 14 represents an array of spontaneous and planned encroachments of vendors on public spaces (Bayat, 1997(Bayat, , 2000Hanser, 2016;Musoni, 2010), varied forms of resistance (Crossa, 2009;Flock & Breitung, 2016;Swider, 2015;Turner & Schoenberger, 2012), and engagement mechanisms with government units (Brown, Lyons, & Dankoco, 2010;Cross, 1998b;Peña, 1999;Swider, 2015). Meanwhile, social systems often refer to socio-economic conditions -poverty, unemployment, migration (Musoni, 2010;Xue & Huang, 2015) and state policies aimed at regulating, controlling or purging informal hawkers (Batréau & Bonnet, 2016;Hlela, 2003;Illy, 1986;Setšabi & Leduka, 2008).…”

“…First, the hostile attitude towards informal activities is often coupled with a preference for formal or state-controlled arrangements (Flock & Breitung, 2016;Gibbings, 2013;Yatmo, 2008) to promote a 'global city' image (Donovan, 2008;Hanser, 2016;Xue & Huang, 2015). To a great extent, this policy reflects the dualistic framing discussed in the earlier section.…”