In the spring of 2012, I watched a group of mobile street vendors set up business at the entrance to the Stadium subway station in Shanghai's Xujiahui 徐家汇 neighbourhood. They arrived in the early evening and lined up their carts on either side of the entrance, from where they sold various street foods, socks, and other small items, to people streaming out of the subway. Suddenly, a lookout on a motorbike zipped around the corner to warn the vendors of an approaching chengguan 城管 (street management) vehicle. The vendors scattered, most cycling away on their three-wheeled bicycle carts (sanlunche 三轮车), griddles of hot tofu steaming as they weaved through the traffic. One man dashed across the busy street and into a side street, carrying his small charcoal grill with lamb kebabs arrayed on top. The simplest operation was that of a phone card dealer, who simply picked up his stool and sign and strode away.
Streets and sidewalks are privileged urban spaces, both public and visible, and they are often sites of intense local state intervention and regulation.Footnote 1 Just as importantly, the visibility and public character of streets and sidewalks also mean that they are key components of a city's “image” and serve as important sites where ideals of, and aspirations for, specific visions of modern urbanism are imposed.Footnote 2 At the same time, streets and sidewalks are also lived-in spaces that depart from the abstract image of urban order. Urban inhabitants appropriate city streets and sidewalks, navigating the physical space of the city in the course of their daily lives and reshaping it to meet their needs and ends. This is especially true of street vendors, who carve out a living in high-traffic street and sidewalk spaces, often in contravention of city regulations. As a result, the regulatory hand of municipal government regularly visits itself upon vendor activities.
In this paper, I argue that just as the visibility of urban streets and sidewalks makes them important discursive and regulatory objects, their public nature also generates a “politics of the street” in which conflicts between authorities and street vendors publicly dramatize state power, at times generating unexpected sympathies and solidarities between vendors and other city residents. Municipal efforts to police street vending in order to produce a modern, urban “face” have a dual effect: they result not only in everyday policing by city authorities and avoidance strategies from vendors but also produce episodic instances of vendor resistance and even dramatic expressions of bystander solidarity that challenge street-level expressions of state power. Below, I first show how the circumstances faced by urban Chinese street vendors, and especially the conflicts that have emerged between vendors and city regulators, reflect the contention between abstract visions of urban space and the practical, everyday appropriations of actual city spaces by urban inhabitants. In particular, I show how negative characterizations of vending put the activity at odds with the “global city” aspirations of urban leaders, and I detail the form of policing that has been developed to regulate a modern “city appearance” (shirong 市容) – the chengguan, enforcers of municipal administrative laws that regulate a wide range of building, street and public space uses.
Despite their broad mandate, the chengguan officers are primarily engaged in the policing of street vendors, and their occasionally violent enforcement methods produce frequent and very public performances of state power. While these vendor–chengguan conflicts are mostly an everyday routine of Chinese city life, occasionally these incidents spark the outrage of onlookers and at times even spur strong expressions of solidarity among crowds who take retaliatory action against the chengguan. In many ways, street vending represents the contestation over whose interests can be accommodated in the modern Chinese city; at the same time, street vendors and the abusive policing measures they face also serve as an allegory, both public and performative, of unequal and authoritarian power in China today.
Research Methods
Data for this analysis come from a variety of sources, including two months of field work in Harbin in 2008 and in Shanghai in 2012, as well as reliance on a range of media, scholarly and government reports.Footnote 3 Fieldwork involved street observations and several weeks spent working at legal vendor stands in two street markets and with one (licensed) street-corner newspaper vendor in Harbin, and street observations and interviews with academic researchers in Shanghai who had carried out vending-related research on behalf of municipal regulators. I also draw upon Chinese-language scholarship on street vending, especially the considerable number of recent fieldwork-based MA and PhD theses carried out in a range of Chinese cities, as well as the limited English-language scholarship on the subject. A database on reporting related to street vending in China's domestic media between the years of 2000 and 2012 was also created from the CNKI Core Newspapers Database by conducting keyword searches primarily with the term tanfan 摊贩 (street peddlar).Footnote 4 A total of 449 articles were collected in all, providing insight into the evolution of public debate over street vending in China across the 12-year period. Because the CNKI data is limited to core, regional “daily” newspapers, it primarily represents an officially sanctioned debate. There can be considerable variation in the policing of vending, both across cities and across city districts and neighbourhoods, but the effort here is to paint a general picture while acknowledging local complexity and variability.
Street (and Sidewalk) Politics
Modern streets and sidewalks are objects of government, conceived of and acted upon through abstract, rationalized and bureaucratic discourses.Footnote 5 Michel Foucault and others have identified the circulatory function of streets as a key target for urban “police” or regulatory powers, reflecting the importance of flows of people and goods through city spaces.Footnote 6 But, streets and sidewalks are also urban “habitat,” appropriated by city inhabitants.Footnote 7 The insight, developed by Henri Lefebvre and elaborated upon by many others,Footnote 8 that city spaces are lived-in spaces of daily habit and experience as well as abstracted and idealized representations and images recognizes the power of urban planners, municipal regulators, developers and others to define the functions and activities suitable in designated spaces.Footnote 9
This kind of effort is underway in many Chinese cities. Visions of sidewalks and streets as “modern” spaces that contribute to both the city's image and the well-being of the city residents as a whole have been mobilized by city leaders who seek to remove undesirable behaviour from these spaces.Footnote 10 As Junxi Qian demonstrates in her study of the efforts to remove motorcycles from Guangzhou roadways, China's urban streets are objects of the disciplinary powers of the state and as such become a contested form of public space in which the daily practices of city inhabitants and the abstract ideals and goals of city leaders clash.Footnote 11
With regards to street vendors, it has proven difficult to assert this vision without generating conflict. Although some cityscapes have been effectively cleansed of street vending, this has only been achieved through assiduous policing; in other places, the imposition of abstract ideals on the lived space of contemporary cities results in not the erasure but rather the dramatization of struggle and conflict. Gengzhi Huang and his co-authors characterize the removal of street vendors from Guangzhou city streets as a form of “revanchism” – an argument in line with much of the literature on informality which often frames street vendor–authority conflicts as the result of “neoliberal urban projects” that pit the interests of urban elites against more marginalized populations.Footnote 12
While this perspective is not wrong, in my view it fails to account adequately for urban streets and sidewalks as particular spaces shaped by what Asef Bayat calls a “politics of the street.”Footnote 13 Bayat notes that (local) state efforts to assert control over public space often clash with efforts by some city dwellers, such as street vendors, to use those spaces for non-sanctioned purposes. The result is a distinctive pattern of everyday encroachment by vendors met with a degree of tolerance and ritualized, low-level policing by authorities, punctuated by episodic crackdowns and even violent resistance or conflicts. Bayat argues that because such episodic, yet dramatic, street conflicts occur in highly visible public spaces, solidarities can spontaneously form without any prior organizational activities or even personal ties. City streets and sidewalks, in other words, are not only one of the only places where marginalized groups can assert themselves but they also hold latent possibilities for collective forms of resistance. While Bayat is primarily concerned with the spontaneous expression of solidarity among vendors themselves, the Chinese case suggests that episodic street solidarities may form more broadly, and city residents may find themselves moved to comment, document or actively oppose instances of abusive street policing.
Street Vending and the “Face” of the Modern City
Street vending in Chinese cities, as a regulatory as well as a discursive object, has varied enormously only across the last several decades. During China's planned economy years, vendors were labelled “tails of capitalism” (zibenzhuyi weiba 资本主义尾巴) and effectively disappeared from city streets.Footnote 14 Although accounts of the re-emergence of urban street commerce in the 1980s vary, street markets and street merchants are generally characterized as a spontaneous by-product of market reforms that the state later began regulating.Footnote 15 Initially, official recognition of the “individual economy” (geti jingji 个体经济) as a support to the planned economy opened the door to legitimate street vending,Footnote 16 and during the 1980s, lax regulatory policies meant that there were few restrictions on where vendors operated and who could engage in such small-scale buying and selling.Footnote 17 According to one account, most independent merchants were unlicensed, but since the street markets they created were seen as “a sign of a vibrant economy,” they suffered from relatively little state interference.Footnote 18 Nevertheless, by the mid to late 1990s, the volume of economic activity on city streets had reached levels that many local states no longer found acceptable.Footnote 19
Dorothy Solinger has argued that the communist state always viewed street vending as a stop-gap measure for dealing with urban unemployment.Footnote 20 From the earliest years of the reform period, the street economy was frequently characterized as both unsightly and morally perilous. Concerns about private vendors selling adulterated or substandard foodstuffs or short-weighing goods were widespread from the early 1980s.Footnote 21 While it was the private nature of the street economy that made it initially most problematic, in the following decades the unstandardized (bu guifan 不规范), unregulated and disorderly (luan 乱) forms of street vending have come to represent vendors' moral failings. Vendors are criticized for being selfish and not civic-minded, and for cheating practices and having a disregard for the condition in which they leave public space, which they “pollute” (wuran 污染).Footnote 22 As one woman in the city of Chongqing told a reporter, “street vendors leave with their money, but casually leave behind vegetable leaves, making the environment dirty and messy (luan).”Footnote 23 Similarly, the Nanning city government has characterized its largest night market as “typified by dirt (zang 脏), disorder (luan) and poor quality (cha 差).”Footnote 24 Such concerns about city appearance are reflected in the newspaper dataset, in which “shirong” received substantive discussion in one-fifth of all articles sampled across the 2000–2012 period.
Contemporary representations of street vending revisit an earlier discourse in China about the street economy and its place in the modern city, similar to debates in many modernizing or gentrifying urban contexts around the world (for example, New York in the late 1800s or Hanoi today).Footnote 25 Modernizing efforts in the late Qing and early Republican periods involved both street regulation and restrictions on, or attempts to eliminate, street commerce. Di Wang documents efforts by social and political elites to regulate public spaces in Chengdu through the establishment of a municipal police force in the early 20th century, with the street a key object of new regulatory activities. The appearance of city streets was taken as “an important indicator of the city's well-being,” and police were tasked with enforcing new rules regarding hygiene, traffic and commercial activity on the street, including where and when street vendors could operate.Footnote 26 Similar efforts in Republican-era Nanjing focused upon groups whose presence on the street was considered undesirable or an eyesore: the poor.Footnote 27 Whereas traditionally the urban street served as a place where the poor could earn a living as peddlers, labourers or beggars, or where they could simply pass the time,Footnote 28 in a modernizing context, “[t]he streets themselves, with their complement of new devices and social roles, including … [the] formal policing of public behavior, systematically projected modern ideas and invention through the city.”Footnote 29 The abstract ideal of modern, “civilized” cities in China was very much at odds with the visible presence of poor and marginal groups on city streets. And, similar to today, efforts to remove vendors from city streets in the pursuit of abstract urban ideals could result in episodic, violent conflicts, such as in Hankou in 1908.Footnote 30
Today, in a context of increasingly intense inter-city competition for foreign investment in which hygiene, order and modern streetscapes are believed to be important,Footnote 31 street vending represents a blemish on the “face” (shirong shimao 市容市貌) of the modern city.Footnote 32 Solinger, as well as Huang and his co-authors, contend that more intensive policing of street vending reflects this desire to build cities into magnets for investment and growth.Footnote 33 The clash between the aspirations of city leaders and the practical realities of urban street life are exemplified by city hygiene or clean-up campaigns, often linked to provincial and national-level awards and designations of cleanness and civility.Footnote 34 For example, as part of Guangzhou's bid for hygienic city status, “more than 250,000 CCTV cameras and a radar system were used to capture street vendors trying to do business in the backstreets.”Footnote 35 Huang and Xue describe how the intensification of crackdowns on street vendors in Guangzhou accompanied major city events, most notably the arrival of the national hygienic city inspection team in 2007.Footnote 36 Once organized around the notion of wenming 文明 (civilizing), meant to legitimize Communist Party rule,Footnote 37 the strong ideological elements in model city campaigns have largely retreated and instead model or hygienic cities are viewed as achieving the more neoliberal ends of attracting investment and fostering rapid economic development.Footnote 38 As Carolyn Cartier and Luigi Tomba have argued, cities can serve as important “symbolic projects” that can facilitate a leader's rise through the Party ranks and state power hierarchies, so the stakes associated with such labels can be high.Footnote 39
Cities have attempted to rein in street vending by discouraging the practice among registered city residents. Solinger argues that, in Wuhan, the urban minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao 低保) programme discourages laid-off workers from earning supplementary income through street vending by penalizing them for additional income, although the dibao provides paltry levels of economic support.Footnote 40 Shanghai explicitly re-employed laid-off state-sector workers to reduce the number of street vendors in the mid-2000s. They were often placed in low-level cleaning or regulatory positions that frequently involved policing sidewalk use.Footnote 41 The success of this policy may be reflected in a 2005 survey of vendors outside one Shanghai university location, which found that only 3 per cent of the 125 vendors questioned held Shanghai hukou 户口 (household registration).Footnote 42
The “floating” or unfixed nature of rural migrants in Chinese cities gives rise to distrust, fear and moral concerns about vendors.Footnote 43 Although many vendors occupy regular locations, they usually do not have formal or permanent claims to those spaces, and some vendors are fundamentally mobile, travelling through and across neighbourhoods in search of business. As such, street vendors can represent a potentially problematic mobility that threatens community order. Huang and Xue describe how the legalization of vending has been rejected in Guangzhou because, according to one city official, if the city provided “10,000” licences for vending, it would quickly be beset by “100,000” vendors: “If Guangzhou doesn't defend itself, every idiot will come to Guangzhou [to vend].”Footnote 44 In fact, part of the initial rationale for creating the chengguan, the urban administrative police discussed below, centred on a desire to control China's “floating population.”Footnote 45
Despite being largely unlicensed, vending is widespread even in cities that have attempted to limit the activity. For example, a Shanghai city survey of street vendors conducted in late 2007 found that there were almost 24,000 vendors in the city's 12 central districts alone; one estimate for Guangzhou, which has attempted to impose a strict limit on vendors, puts the number at 30,000.Footnote 46 A persistent and even mounting concern with street vending is reflected in the growing number of media reports dealing with the topic. The CNKI newspaper database, for example, reveals a surge of reporting on the topic of street vendors, from some 27 articles in 2005, 120 in 2008, to just over 800 in 2011.
The burgeoning media coverage reflects a growing disjuncture between aspirations for the modern Chinese city among urban leaders and the ways in which vendors make use of city streets and sidewalks. The results have been the enforcement of bans against street vendors, fines for unlicensed vending, and heavy-handed policing, all practices that give rise to so-called “guerrilla warfare” or “games of cat-and-mouse” between street vendors and the chengguan, the urban administrative police largely responsible for putting a stop to unlicensed street vending.
Urban Regulation and the Chengguan
Regulation of city streets and sidewalks is a prime example of what urban scholars have called “police powers,” a form of state regulation in the name of the public good. As Nicholas Blomley has argued, the city is the “quintessential police site,” where urban concentration demands many forms of government regulation and intervention for hygiene, functioning markets and efficient traffic flow.Footnote 47 City streets in China, too, are key targets of state disciplinary powers, and despite very local, and therefore varied, patterns of street governance, a specific model for the regulation of city streets and urban spaces has been widely adopted since the late 1990s.Footnote 48
Popularly known as the “chengguan,” a shortened version of chengshi guanli xingzheng zhifa ju 城市管理行政执法局 (municipal administration law enforcement bureau), this government unit regulates not only street vending but also illegal construction, business signage, and even parking. Originating from an administrative experiment carried out in Beijing's former Xuanwu district 宣武区 in 1997, creation of this new unit was part of an effort to deal with an explosion of street markets and vendors. Labelled a “municipal supervision team” (chengshi guanli jiancha dadui 城市管理监察大队), the unit combined the regulatory efforts of a wide range of municipal departments, from city planning to commerce administration to hygiene.Footnote 49 Deemed a success, chengguan units spread across the country: it was reported in 2006 that some 80 cities had implemented the system, estimated that in 2007 more than 200 cities had installed chengguan teams, and reported that, by 2010, 308 cities, almost half of all cities in China, had formed chengguan units.Footnote 50
In a legal sense, the chengguan units function as administrative regulators, enforcing non-criminal regulations that fall outside the purview of the public security bureau.Footnote 51 Beijing's chengguan bureau, the national model, describes its main functions or duties as “carrying out national and municipal-level laws and regulations related to city administration and the maintenance of urban order.” Specific areas of responsibility are very broad, and include city appearance and sanitation, city planning (including the regulation of illegal construction), industrial and commercial administration (for instance, fining vendors operating without licences), construction sites (including resettlement issues), and even the regulation and fining of illegal travel guides.Footnote 52 By 2006, the chengguan in Beijing had been empowered to issue fines for some 285 offences.Footnote 53
This list of duties means that chengguan officials spend much of their time on city streets, travelling in teams and intervening when they find violations, issuing warnings and fines, and confiscating illegal stands, merchandise, or sealing off illegal buildings or structures.Footnote 54 The formal powers of chengguan members are ostensibly limited to the imposition of fines and confiscation of property, powers that are outlined in the 1996 Administrative Penalties Law, but many have argued that legal vagueness has led to abuses and sometimes expansive powers.Footnote 55 There are no clear rules for how confiscated items are to be disposed of, and reports of excessive fines or the use of excessive force are widespread.Footnote 56 Statistics for Shanghai's Pudong 浦东 district chengguan show that, in the first ten months of 2006, some 228 people were injured as a result of altercations with chengguan teams in that district alone.Footnote 57 On occasion, chengguan officers themselves are the victims of violence, one example being the death of Li Zhiqiang 李志强, a Beijing chengguan officer who was stabbed to death in 2006 by a street vendor trying to prevent the confiscation of his bicycle cart.Footnote 58 Although a new law, the Administrative Enforcement Law, was passed in 2011 and is meant to curb abuses, such as excessive fines, violence and other arbitrary and often unsanctioned forms of street policing, by providing clearer guidelines on the enforcement of administrative regulations, reports of chengguan violence continue to appear.Footnote 59 A 2012 report on the chengguan by Human Rights Watch lists over 150 cases of physical abuse reported in the Chinese media between July 2010 and March 2012; well over half of those conflicts involved street vendors, and many others involved passers-by attempting to intervene on the vendors' behalf.Footnote 60
In practice, chengguan activities are largely devoted to the policing of unlicensed street vendors, an activity primarily conducted out of urban street offices.Footnote 61 A 2006 report from Shanghai confirms this point, noting that almost 80 per cent of the cases dealt with by the Pudong district's chengguan team from January to October of 2006 involved illegal street vending.Footnote 62 These statistics suggest that such policing activities produce an everyday environment of frequent, low-level conflict for vendors. The fact that these conflicts take place on public streets and in public view also means that they serve as very visible enactments of state power and are implicated in a potentially explosive “politics of the street.”
The Politics of Policing the Street
As public spaces, city streets represent a very particular disciplinary target for local authorities, and chengguan policing cannot be divorced from the highly visible spaces in which those activities unfold. Most interactions between street vendors and chengguan officers follow the “everyday” patterns of vendor encroachment, which is met with some tolerance for their activities and punctuated by more forceful policing that seeks to drive them away. Yet, in some instances, small-scale conflicts trigger spontaneous, collective responses to chengguan policing measures. These “episodic” forms of resistance, as Asef Bayat argues, are a product of the public nature of the street itself, where mutual visibility lends itself to such unexpected, unorganized solidarities among strangers.Footnote 63 While these patterns are not unique to China, chengguan efforts to maintain discipline on the street can nevertheless have unpredictable, local consequences.
The “everyday” drama of chengguan–vendor interactions, most often involving vendor retreat, is part of quotidian urban street life.Footnote 64 Unlicensed vendors often sell from bicycle carts that allow for quick getaways, and the drama of these escapes is a favourite of the Chinese news media. One account describes a Beijing food vendor fleeing from a bus stop when he spotted by a chengguan official getting off a nearby bus. In his haste, he crashed into another food cart, injuring a woman vendor, only to discover that the chengguan official was not only off-duty but actually from the city of Tianjin.Footnote 65 Also much cited is a report that, in 2006, Beijing chengguan discovered a specialized “map for avoiding and escaping chengguan” in the possession of an unlicensed street vendor.Footnote 66
For vendors, chengguan policing behaviour is arbitrary and unpredictable and alternates between tolerance and enforcement, a consequence of what Matthew Ferchen describes as “cyclical disregard and enforcement.”Footnote 67 As one source in Shanghai explained, administrative enforcement units often do the minimum policing required but are spurred into greater policing intensity by residents' complaints, media exposés, food safety incidents, or key city events such as the 2008 Olympics in Beijing or the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.Footnote 68 As a result, sometimes the chengguan pass by but take no action, at other times they may confront vendors but issue no fines, and at yet other times they may confiscate merchandise and carts. Huang and Xue suggest that the imposition of a panoptical system of surveillance in Guangzhou in the form of street cameras and unpredictable chengguan street patrols has created an environment in which vendors feel watched but uncertain of when enforcers might appear – a constant movement between “disciplinary” and “penal” forms of power.Footnote 69 The vendor accounts collected by Human Rights Watch describe encounters in which little justification or warning is given for violent enforcement actions.Footnote 70 Frequently, the chengguan are not held accountable for their violence: payment for damages might be made or individual chengguan agents charged or fired, but there are many cases in which no disciplinary action or restitution seems to have been made. Yet, chengguan officers have no legal right to use force, except in self-defence.Footnote 71
Media reports of conflicts with chengguan – in my dataset, it was the second most frequently reported theme, appearing in 21 per cent of media reports – coupled with the frequent occurrence of chengguan–vendor conflicts on city streets, produces considerable sympathy for vendors and antipathy towards chengguan officials among the general public. Many people have personally witnessed vendors fleeing chengguan enforcement activities. For example, a survey conducted by China Youth News in 2007 found that 96.5 per cent of their respondents had personally witnessed conflicts between chengguan officers and street vendors; the same survey found that almost 95 per cent of respondents often or sometimes patronized street vendors.Footnote 72 Over 70 per cent of the people surveyed also said they opposed chengguan policing actions against vendors, and over 50 per cent were supportive of more tolerant policies towards vendors.Footnote 73 A similar show of support was found in another (very limited) 2007 survey of 100 individuals in Chongqing, 67 per cent of whom supported Chongqing's new, more lenient policies towards vendors.Footnote 74
These perspectives are manifested on the street itself in the form of active support for vendors. Many sources describe how city residents or local business owners may take the side of the vendors, sometimes even helping them evade the chengguan or allowing them to hide goods in residents' homes.Footnote 75 Forms of collective vendor resistance include organized lookouts (often on a home-town basis) and even the use of walkie-talkies by well-organized street merchants to maintain tabs on chengguan movements.Footnote 76 When vendors resist fines or the confiscation of their goods, violence can ensue.Footnote 77
Because conflicts usually take place on busy sidewalks or streets, they frequently attract crowds of bystanders who may be moved to comment or even intervene or document abuse. As Emmanuel Caron notes, because this particular form of enforcement is so public, chengguan activities become subject to the potentially critical interpretations of both vendors and bystanders.Footnote 78 For example, a research assistant in Harbin described to me how her boyfriend challenged a chengguan officer attempting to confiscate the tools and small table of a street vendor by asking if his actions were in accordance with the amended Chinese constitution's private property protections.Footnote 79
In mid-June 2008 in Harbin, I observed at close hand an incident during which an onlooker was vocally critical of the chengguan. I had been shadowing a newspaper vendor who operated, legally, from a street corner on one of Harbin's ring roads. An ice-cream seller had pulled up to the street curb next to the small newspaper cart, having moved from his earlier location in a park area behind us. A short while later, a chengguan van stopped abruptly in front of the ice-cream seller. One officer jumped out of the van, while several others waited inside the vehicle. The chengguan officer angrily berated the vendor for selling on the curb. “You've been warned again and again,” the officer said, “that you cannot sell here.” A crowd of a dozen or so people immediately formed around the scene. The chengguan officer called to one of his colleagues to take a photograph of the vendor. The chengguan officer then pulled out a book and noted down the ice-cream vendor's name and ID card number. A man in the crowd said something about laobaixing 老百姓 (the common people) and wondered out loud why it was okay for the newspaper stand to trade but not the ice-cream seller. As the chengguan prepared to leave, the ice-cream vendor pulled his cart back into the park, a distance of 10 or 15 metres. In my view, the tone and degree of abuse was more than asking a vendor to switch locations would seem to have warranted.
The discontented man, who had been angry about the chengguan actions against the ice-cream seller, drifted over to the newspaper cart with a little group. Someone commented that next time the ice-cream vendor might really get fined. The discontent wondered again about the newsstand, and someone explained to him that the newsstand was allowed. This turn in the conversation made the newspaper vendor nervous, and she explained, “Public security (gong'an 公安), industry and commerce (gongshang 工商) … I have all those licences.” She noted that the chengguan visit was not surprising, given that the city's annual trade fair was set to open the next day. “I don't dare sell anything but newspapers because they are watching everything so strictly,” she told the small group (she usually also sold bottled water from her stand). Later, when the ice-cream vendor passed us on his way home, the newspaper vendor said to him, “Why didn't you move? You were looking right at me and I was signalling to you [the chengguan were coming] and you didn't move!”
In the rust-belt city of Harbin, one would not expect that the policing of laid-off workers struggling to make a living by aggressive chengguan officers would garner much public support; however, as the discontented man's comments suggest, these public dramas provide a context in which people may voice criticisms of local enforcers. A latent “politics of the street” means that, at times, chengguan–vendor conflicts can evolve into dramatic scenes of spontaneous solidarity between vendors and other city residents. People who may in no other way identify with street vendors can be outraged by chengguan abuses. For example, in the 21-month period between July 2010 and March 2012, 26 of the 162 cases of chengguan violence documented by Human Rights Watch involved the intervention of bystanders or onlookers on behalf of vendors. Sixteen of these cases concerned individuals who either attempted to document violent acts with cameras or cell phones, or who directly intervened by challenging the use of force by chengguan officials; in all these cases, the bystanders were subsequently attacked as well.Footnote 80 The other ten incidents in which onlookers became actively engaged in chengguan conflicts involved collective action by angry crowds. In some cases, onlookers surrounded chengguan vehicles and prevented them from leaving the scene before the police could be summoned. In Chengdu, Sichuan province, in May 2011, a large group of young women expressed their outrage at the beating of an elderly vendor by surrounding the chengguan vehicle and insisting upon an apology.Footnote 81 Similar incidents were reported in Quanzhou 泉州, Fujian, in February 2012, and in Changsha 长沙, Hunan, in April 2011.Footnote 82 In an incident in Nanjing in 2008, angry onlookers surrounded two chengguan vehicles to prevent them from leaving, and an old man reportedly threw eggs at one of the vehicles; police from the public security bureau were called in to intervene.Footnote 83 Notably, all these instances reflect efforts by onlookers to hold chengguan officers accountable for their behaviour.
At times, these public displays of anger take on dramatic proportions. For example, a riot in Anshun 安顺, Guizhou province, in 2011, involved thousands of people after a disabled fruit vendor was beaten to death during a chengguan raid. Vehicles were flipped over and smashed, and tear gas and smoke bombs were used to disperse the crowd.Footnote 84 On other occasions, crowds have blocked major city streets and demanded that higher authorities intervene and provide redress. In the city of Xi'an in September 2010, a crowd moved an abandoned chengguan vehicle into the middle of a road and demanded that the officers return. The crowd remained for five hours before the public security bureau convinced it to allow the vehicle's removal.Footnote 85 There were more violent and sustained actions in Xintang 新塘, a major textile manufacturing centre in Guangdong province, when a conflict between street vendors and security personal led to three days of rioting by migrant workers.Footnote 86 Many observers interpreted the violence in Xintang as the eruption of pent-up tensions between migrant workers and locals, but it is instructive that the incident began with the highly visible policing of a vendor on the street.
Conclusion
Streets and sidewalks are contested urban spaces in China. On the one hand, municipal leaders seek to create streetscapes that conform to visions of urban modernity and in which street vendors, representing “backward,” “dirty” and low-level forms of economic activity, have become unwelcome. This is reflected in city policies regulating, and even banning, street vending and is practically enacted through the enforcement activities of chengguan units. Efforts by urban authorities to produce modern cityscapes through such disciplinary measures not only operate in contention with the practical uses ordinary urbanites and street vendors make of city streets and sidewalks, but they can also generate a “politics of the street” through which state power and vendor marginality are dramatized for onlookers. While the eradication of street vendors is welcomed by some urban residents, it is received with hostility not just by vendors but also by many urban residents as well, and conflicts at times even provide the setting for spontaneous expressions of solidarity between vendors and passers-by.
In a sense, there are different visions of city streets and sidewalks simultaneously at work, and different ideas about what kinds of activities are appropriately carried out in those spaces. In contrast to concerns about city “image” (xingxiang 形象) or “face” (shirong), published support for vendors champions the street economy as quite literally a path (lu 路) to survival – shengcun chulu 生存出路 or huolu 活路.Footnote 87 Some commentators have called for a better balance between the “public interest” (gonggong liyi 公共利益) in orderly, clean streets, and the “right to subsistence” (shengcun quan 生存权) of China's poor.Footnote 88
Likewise, criticisms of the chengguan abound: from characterizations of the chengguan as a mafia-like “rogue bureau” to commentaries published in places as prominent as the China Daily that argue that the existence of the chengguan has no clear or legitimate basis in law.Footnote 89 Reports on the chengguan frequently reference the enormous number of hits produced by an internet search using the terms chengguan da ren 城管打人 (chengguan beat people; 1.2 million hits at the time of writing).Footnote 90 Furthermore, in 2008, a story circulated on the internet that the entry for chengguan on Baidu Baike had been “egao-ed” (pranked) to define the city regulators as: “A mafia that bullies storekeepers unable to pay their rent or economically challenged groups with problems with their licences … Adjectives: cruel, bloody, frightening … Verbs: beat, smash, rob.”Footnote 91
Municipal and higher authorities are not unaware of the negative impact of chengguan policing excesses and the potentially explosive public reaction, and this is reflected in the evolution of reporting on street vendors over time. The newspaper dataset reveals a sudden proliferation of cities “lifting bans” (jiejin 解禁) on street vending in 2007 and adopting new policies, such as establishing set vending locations or temporary vending spaces (although these are often in peripheral areas with insufficient footfall) and tiered-approaches to policing (such as zero tolerance in highly visible, symbolically important spaces, and “tolerance” in out-of-the-way residential spaces).Footnote 92 The People's Daily even carried a series of articles exploring “the hardships unlicensed vendors face in making a living (mousheng 谋生).”Footnote 93 My database also shows a proliferation of calls in the state media for the legalization of street vending in 2009, and exhortations for the chengguan to shift its orientation from “management” (guan 管) to “service” (fuwu 服务). Caron, too, documents efforts to “humanize” chengguan activities in Beijing, although he emphasizes the “instrumental” nature of such changes, which aim to “achiev[e] more effective control.”Footnote 94
Indeed, in densely populated Chinese cities the different visions of the street remain difficult to reconcile and continue to highlight divergent ideas about how public space is appropriately organized and used and whose interests may be served there. In a sense, the forced physical mobility imposed upon street vendors by chengguan enforcement activities contrasts sharply with the closing-off of urban streets and sidewalks as an avenue to upward social mobility, limited though it may be. Huang and his co-authors have argued that a more progressive political environment, spurred by the promotion of “social harmony” by the central government, has exerted pressure on municipal governments to deal with vending in a less conflict-inducing fashion and has resulted in “softer” regulations. They characterize these expressions of “inclusiveness” towards vendors as highly ambivalent, and as giving “priority to a specific city image and urban order” and relegating legal vending locations to peripheral locations,Footnote 95 a pattern found in other cities, such as Shanghai, as well.
While accommodations for street vendors, when made at all, are “ambivalent,” I believe this move is as much about recognizing the problems with policing the streets as it is about responding to the central government's “progressive” policies. The episodic violence associated with chengguan enforcement dramatizes state power publicly and carries with it the latent danger of a violent crowd response. Although the “politics of the street” that can be activated by aggressive and violent policing in public spaces is hardly unique to China (witness recent controversies in the United States), the threat posed by such politics is likely to be viewed with greater urgency in authoritarian contexts. As one source in Shanghai observed, Chinese people are very conscious of the top-down nature of power in their society. Why remind them of this in such a thuggish fashion?
Biographical note
Amy Hanser is an associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her research has focused upon numerous aspects of contemporary Chinese society, such as gender and employment, social inequality, and consumption and consumerism. Her publications include Service Encounters: Class, Gender and the Market for Social Distinction in Urban China (2008).
