DRAFT – DRAFT- DRAFT
Reshaping China’s urban citizenship: street vendors, chengguan and struggles over the
right to the city
FINAL VERISON IS FORTHCOMING IN CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY (2014)
Sarah Swider
Department of Sociology, Wayne State University, USA
Abstract
This article examines spatial politics involved with the remaking urban of citizenship across
Chinese cities. China’s emerging urban citizenship is shaped by its hukou system, which not only
spatially and socially segregates rural migrants and urban natives in the cities, but also creates a
large group of unregistered or “illegal” migrants. This case study of unregistered migrant street
venders looks at the implications of their unregistered status and how it has changed over time,
shifting from creating benefits to becoming a burden. I capture how unregistered migrants’ lack
of status has increasingly become an important basis of exclusion, and a burden, as they are
denied access to new legitimate avenues of claims making such as NGOs, courts and arbitration.
This helps explain the increasingly common, and intensifying, clashes between migrant street
vendors who are struggling for a right to the city, and the chengguan, public security officers
who are charged with regulating the streets.
Keywords
Chengguan, China, migration, spatial politics, street vendors, tolerated illegality, right to the city,
unregistered migrants, unregistered migrants, urban citizenship.
Introduction
China’s urban citizenship is built upon an institution known as the hukou 1 system (Solinger,
1999; Chan and Zhang, 1999; Goldman and Perry, 2002). In simple terms, the hukou assigns
everyone a permanent place of registration and a status (agricultural or non-agricultural). One
important consequence of hukou status is that it determines ones level of, and access to, social
benefits and entitlements. Urban hukous are associated with urban citizenship and provide access
to high quality social benefits such as education and healthcare, along with full entitlements
including retirement and unemployment insurance. In contrast, “rural hukous” include fewer
entitlements and lower quality social benefits. This system was consolidated in the early Maoistperiod when almost 80 percent of the population lived in rural areas; hence they were assigned
rural hukous. During this time, it became a powerful tool used by the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) to limit population mobility and organize both production and redistribution in the
centrally planned economy (Wang, 2005; Cheng and Selden, 1994).
In the post-Maoist period, economic reform and relaxed administrative controls have made it
possible for peasants to leave the land and migrate to the cities. However, they live in the city as
second class citizens because the vast majority is denied urban hukous and associated citizenship
rights. 2 This system physically incorporates migrants into the cities and benefit from their labor
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without socially integrating them, shifting the cost of social reproduction back to the rural areas. 3
In most cases they cannot access public goods like education, housing and healthcare (Chan and
Zhang, 1999). 4 In the cities, these migrants are also generally denied entitlements such as the
basic minimum living allowance, unemployment insurance, and retirement pensions (Golley and
Meng, 2011; Liu, 2007). Furthermore, without an urban hukou, migrants’ economic rights are
limited. For example, some cities like Beijing restrict migrants to certain jobs and professions
and it is difficult, if not impossible, for migrants to register their own business without partnering
with locals (He, 2005). In sum, temporary residency status in the city does not translate into
substantive urban citizenship for migrants (Wang, 2005; Alexander and Chan, 2004) and instead
is associated with increased inequality, labor market segmentation, and discrimination (Huang,
2001; Guo and Iredale, 2004; Zhang and Meng, 2001).
Since migrants cannot gain urban citizenship and are denied access to associated benefits, many
do not register in the city and effectively become “illegal,” lacking any right to be in the city.
This large population of unregistered migrants is an important but overlooked, and possibly
unintended, consequence of China’s hukou system (Huang, 2009). In many cases, both
unregistered and registered migrants share a common fate of being denied access to economic
and social benefits in the city. This forces them to live, work, and/or exist in informal spaces
outside of the umbrella of the state. However, this article turns our attention from economic to
political rights and explores one of the most notable differences between registered and
unregistered migrants: the former have a right to be in the city while the latter do not; and the
consequences of not being registered have transformed over time from a benefit to a burden.
For much of the reform period, which started in 1979, the process of becoming a registered
migrant in the city was burdensome due to high costs and complicated documentation
requirements. At the same time, registration offered few, if any, benefits. In fact, this study
suggests unregistered migrants gained the unique benefit of falling off the state’s radar, which
offered them a kind of Foucauldian freedom from the panoptic Communist Party. However,
within the last decade the burdens of registration have attenuated while the benefits have
increased. Registered migrants are now granted a limited set of rights in the cities while
unregistered migrants lack status. This lack of status is an important source of political exclusion
as they lack the right to have rights and it also prevents them from accessing new “legitimate”
legal avenues for asserting rights and claims making. 5 The changing context has increased
struggles for a right to the city, which occur between two groups with ambiguous positions in
relation to the state; unregistered migrants who don’t have a right to be in the city, and local
chengguan officials who are not police, yet charged with policing urban space and enforcing
local regulations.
In the next section, I provide a broad overview of how theorizing and the conceptualization of
citizenship has changed over time, and then focus on introducing the concept of urban
citizenship and the closely linked idea of the “right to the city.” I also outline the development
of urban citizenship in China under the hukou system, giving specific attention to the way
migrants become spatially and socially segregated in the city. This is followed by a case study of
unregistered migrants working as street vendors, and their interactions with the chengguan. It
captures how unregistered migrants have increasingly contested the boundaries of their
segregation as they demand a right to the city. The conclusion explores implications of this
rising contention, offers insights into emerging spatial politics in China’s cities, and looks at how
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this case study in China informs our understanding of the underlying dynamic processes that
produce spatial injustice and shape the resulting struggles over that space.
Urban citizenship and the right to the city
Marshall’s (1964) bedrock formulation of citizenship provides the basis for most of the prolific
work that has expanded, challenged, and re-conceptualized notions of citizenship. Marshall
conceived of citizenship as an expansion of membership rights in a nation, starting from the civil,
moving to the political and eventually the social realms. His ideal types have been contextualized
and historicized by scholars like Brubaker (1992) who shows how the development of nations,
along with the dynamic interactions of different interests, shapes citizenship. As a result, notions
of citizenship range from expansive assimilationist attitudes towards nationality to more
restrictive and exclusive notions based on sanguinity. Habermas (1996), also building on
Marshall’s work, moves in another direction by expanding the notion of citizenship as a legally
ascribed membership to include a political and cultural meaning which empowers citizens to
actively participate in the maintenance of the nation.
These studies that link citizenship with the concept of nation are compelling and insightful but
not without criticism. As Sassen (2005) suggests, “The national as container of social process
and power is cracked (pg 285).” In agreement, some scholars argued that citizenship is moving
towards a post-national (Soysal, 1994) or global model (Held, 2000; Castells, 2011). In this
framework, processes such as globalization and immigration are seen as weakening the nationstate and challenging the foundations of national citizenship, requiring it to be re-theorized on a
broader level (Schiller et al., 1995; Castles and Davidson, 2000). For other scholars,
conceptualization of citizenship needs to move in the opposite direction, within nations. Subnational (denationalized) citizenship looks at citizenship forms that exist within national
boundaries. For example, Kymlicka’s (1995) notion of multicultural citizenship, an alternative
to assimilationist approaches to immigrants, suggests the need to recognize and protect different
cultures within a nation. Isin and Wood (1999) argue that citizenship is both a set of practices
(cultural, symbolic, and economic) and a bundle of rights and duties (civic, political and social)
that can be understood on the local level. Another important example of sub-national citizenship
is urban citizenship.
The concept of urban citizenship has gained prominence as cities have become salient sites for
contesting rights. In part, this is because formal citizenship, which refers to membership, is often
granted on the national level, while substantive citizenship, meaning access to political, civil,
cultural and economic rights is established on the local level (Holston and Appadurai, 1999;
Purcell, 2002). Global cities and megacities are of particular importance because of the
concentrations of wealth and greater inequality leads to clashes over issues of citizenship and
rights (Sassen, 2002; Harvey, 2008). The rise of urban citizenship also suggests that cities are
where identity, politics and power interact to create access to political, civil, and economic rights
(Desai and Sanyal, 2012).
Urban citizenship is strongly linked to the concept of a “right to the city” which is particularly
important in developing countries where rapid rates of urbanization are spatially reorganizing
people and changing social relations. As a result, the majority of the world’s population is
located in “urban peripheries in conditions of illegal and irregular residence, around urban
centers that benefit from their services and their poverty (Holston, 2010: p 1).” These people are
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taking up struggles for the right to be in the city, to exist, to become part of the city and have a
secured place in this space. Harvey (2008) argues that this right is collective not individualistic,
as his often quoted statement suggests,
The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is
a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an
individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a
collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and
remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most
neglected of our human rights (p. 23).
Holston (2010) emphasizes the political aspects of the right to the city and its connection to
urban citizenship. He argues that people shift from a framework of “declaring needs” to a
framework of demanding those needs as rights, or shift from need-based to a right-based
discourse,
Yet these conditions also generate a characteristic response: precisely in the urban
peripheries, residents come to understand their basic needs in terms of their inhabiting the
city, suffering it, building their daily lives in it, making its landscape, history, and politics
a place for themselves. The many meanings of this making often coalesce into a sense
that they have a right to the city. This transformation of need into right has made cities a
strategic arena for the development of new and insurgent citizenships (Holston, 2008, p
1).
Sassen (2002) also emphasizes the political by pointing to the fact that local citizenship gives
rise to new practices, identities and claims-making.
These citizenship practices have to do with the production of ‘presence’ by those without
power and a politics that claims rights to the city. Through these practices new forms of
citizenship are taking shape, with the city as a key site for this type of political work, and,
indeed, itself partly shaped through these dynamics (pg 285).
The origins and development of both urban citizenship and the right to the city make them
particularly useful concepts when trying to understand how citizenship in China is being
reshaped in the post-Maoist period. Urban citizenship is salient given that the hukou system
links one’s access to benefits and entitlements to locality rather than nationality. Furthermore,
hukou regulations themselves have become decentralized and localized (Zhang and Wang, 2010;
Zhang, 2012) increasing the importance of cities as sites for negotiating citizenship and
associated rights. The “right to the city” is an equally useful concept when thinking about
migrants and citizenship in China because it captures the contradictory reality facing most
migrants in China’s cities. Finally, it helps us refocus on the political, not just economic,
ramification of citizenship as shaped by the hukou system.
The reshaping of urban citizenship in China under the hukou system
China doesn’t easily fit the theoretical model of citizenship that has developed based on Western
liberal democracies. One major difference is that citizenship in China doesn’t provide, or even
strive to provide, equal entitlements to all participants. Another important difference is that in
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China formal membership does not necessarily lead to substantive citizenship, meaning just
because someone is granted the right to be in the city doesn’t mean that this right is associated
with social entitlements (Zhang, 2002; Liu, 2007). Finally, contrary to some theoretical
predictions, development of the market in China has not led to increased rights, expanded
citizenship, or democracy (Goldman and Perry, 2002; Solinger, 1999).
The incompatibility of this theoretical model with empirical reality in China forces us to explore
alternative frameworks and concepts to understand citizenship in this context. Accordingly, some
scholars have turned towards the concept of urban citizenship, which emerges out of work that
challenges Western centric frameworks and confronts the impact of neo-liberalism on national
citizenship (Purcell, 2003; Smith and Guarnizo, 2009). The emerging model of urban citizenship
in China is characterized by spatial, economic and social segregation of urban natives and
migrants (Zhang, 2002; Gua and Shen, 2003). Migrants represent between 15-17 percent of the
total Chinese population (Chan, 2010), and in large cities such as Shanghai or Beijing, they
account for about a third of the urban population. Despite their prevalence and importance in
China’s large metropolises, migrants are spatially, culturally and socially segregated.
One might wonder how cities full of Chinese people can be segregated, or how people know who
is a migrant and who is a local. A concept known as “place-based ethnicity,” elucidates how this
seemingly homogenous population constructs and maintains strong solidarities and divisions
(Honig, 1992). Place-based ethnicity is based on locale and binds people together through shared
cultural, linguistic, historical and sometimes social identity. In China, place-based ethnicity is
salient, and as a result, locals can identify migrants by their body language, their dress,
mannerism and the way they talk. It takes on a biological essentialism similar to the concept of
race in the United States or nationality in parts of Europe. Migrants are seen as culturally inferior,
dirty (zang), uncivilized (meiyou wenhua), stupid (sha), and lacking in proper language (shuohua
cao/tuhua). These traits are associated with the idea that they are lesser humans, they are often
referred to as having “low human quality” (suzhidi), which explains why they are more likely to
be manual workers (dagong) and criminals (zuifan). While locals look down upon these
“outsiders,” their lives in large cities have become highly dependent upon migrants (Zhang,
2001). Migrants are nannies taking care of children, selling fresh fruit and vegetables in
neighborhoods across the cities, building new housing and sweeping streets. They are also
servers, cooks, cleaners and porters and drivers, builders, guards and the repairmen. They help
make the city function as they provide massive amount of cheap labor necessary to build these
cities and to subsidize urban life. In sum, like in other countries, despite their social and spatial
segregation, urban centers benefit from the services and poverty of these migrants.
In many ways, the spatial, economic and social segregation of registered and unregistered
migrants is similar. For both groups, it is shaped by the hukou system, which denies all migrants
urban citizenship and limits access to social entitlements and economic rights. The most notable
examples are unequal access to housing, employment, and education. Registered and nonregistered migrants are denied access to housing subsidies and to low-cost public housing in the
cities. This forces many into informal and tenuous arrangements such as onsite dormitories,
accommodations in the basements and back rooms of buildings where they work, high density
rental housing in enclaves, and makeshift shelter in hidden public spaces such as under bridges,
along waterways, and in alleyways. They also share commonalities in terms of employment
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segregation and wage differentials. In some cities, like Shanghai and Beijing, the labor markets
are formally segregated as migrants are prohibited from taking certain kinds of “good” jobs such
as civil servant positions (Meng and Zhang, 2001). This is reinforced by informal practices such
as locals blocking access to certain professions like taxi drivers in Beijing, or employers only
hiring migrants for jobs such as manufacturing and manual construction work. Finally, migrant
children are effectively denied access to the urban education system. Unregistered migrants
cannot send their children to school because they do not have proper documentation. Registered
migrants who want to send their children to urban schools must supply significant documentation
and pay higher tuition and sponsorship than locals (Liang and Chen, 2007). In most cases, costs
are prohibitive, forcing migrants to choose between informal migrant schools in the cities,
sending their children back to the countryside to stay with relatives and attend rural schools, or
forgoing their children’s education to have them work instead. 6 All three pathways result in the
segregation of migrant and local children.
Despite the similarities facing both registered and unregistered migrants, especially in terms of
their access to economic resources and social/public goods, there are also significant differences.
These important differences emerge when we shift our attention away from economic benefits of
citizenship to look at political rights. In the next section, I present a case study of unregistered
migrant street vendors to show how the consequences of their unregistered status have changed
over time. It captures how political membership is increasing salient and underlies intensifying
contention between unregistered migrants and the local state.
Contesting the boundaries of segregation: A right to be in the city
This study is unique in its focus on unregistered migrants and use of longitudinal data to
construct how the implications of their lack of status in the cities changed over time. Street
vending is one of the most common jobs for migrants, especially unregistered migrants. Also,
street vendors occupy public space, which increases interactions with local government and
citizens, which are central to reshaping urban citizenship practices.
The data used in this analysis comes from field research that has been conducted over a period of
nine years, starting with a year-long visit in 2004-05 with follow-up visits in 2006, 2009, and
2012 ranging in length from one to five months. 7 The core of this analysis is a small set of
longitudinal data about a group of street vendors that I have followed over the course of these
nine years. The original group consists of nine vendors, all of whom are women participating in
fruit or vegetable vending in Beijing. Those data are supplemented with 10 additional openended interviews with random vendors in Beijing (three), Guangzhou (three), and Wuhan (four).
The data also includes four interviews with local citizens (two in Beijing and two in Guangzhou)
and local officials (again two in Beijing and two in Guangzhou). 8 Interviews with vendors focus
on three topic areas: 1) background information about the vendor, 2) details of how the business
is conducted, and 3) interactions with both customers and state local enforcement agencies.
Interviews with local citizens and local state officials/enforcement officers cover a range of
topics; the data used in this article comes from questions that focus on 1) understanding their
interactions with vendors and 2) their opinions and ideas about vendors and street regulations. 9
The case study and data are presented in three sections. The first section focuses on providing
some background and demographic information on street vendors and the main enforcement
agency officers who regulate street activity, known as the chengguan. The second section looks
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at how public spaces and streets are regulated and socially segregated. Finally, the third section
documents changes in the spatial boundaries of street vending, and in the interactions between
the migrants and chengguan.
Populating the streets: street vendors and the chengguan
China’s massive migration has fueled urbanization with more than half of the population now
living in urban areas and increasingly working in the tertiary sector. Another important trend has
been the rise of informal work. By 2009, sixty percent of all urban employment in China was
informal, meaning it is performed outside the purview of the state, and migrants fill a majority of
these jobs (Huang, 2009). 10 Informal urban work is diverse but street vendors are one of the most
common occupations, and since the economic opening in 1978, they have become a ubiquitous
and integral part of China’s urban streetscapes (Dutton, 1998; Solinger, 1999; Zhang, 2001). 11
Street vendors are a diverse group. 12 Many, if not most, are migrants, especially unregistered
migrants. There are some street vendors who are local citizens who are unemployed or laid-off
workers, and there are also some college students. 13 One notable difference among these groups
is that in many places urban citizens can get licenses to sell on the street while migrants cannot,
making the very practice of street vending illegal for migrants. Migrant street vendors who sell
goods are usually women, many are older women. In contrast, street vendors who cook food and
sell it are more likely to be men; the men cook and women assist. 14 While the work is gendered,
street vending is often a family activity.
As the number of street vendors has grown so have the local entities responsible for regulating
them. Many Chinese cities have established para-police called chengguan, also known as urban
management officers to enforce local urban laws and regulations. 15 In 1997, Beijing was the first
city to establish an urban management office with roughly 100 officers which has since grown to
over 6,000 officers. Other cities have followed suit, and by 2005, around 308 cities had
established chengguan forces (Human Rights Watch, 2012). Some cities, such as Shanghai,
Guangzhou and Nanjing also have City Appearance Administrations (shirong guanliju) which
have a mandate and jurisdiction that overlap with the chengguan. 16 These offices are charged
with enforcing a wide range of local ordinances and regulations which are sometime vague and
vary across place. However, one of their primary activities is regulating the streets and public
spaces, with a focus on street vending. Another important common characteristic of the
chengguan is that they are local citizens. In many cases they are older men with local hukous
(urban citizenship) who were laid-off or unemployed workers before being hired. 17 They are
embedded in the communities, working out of the local community-based sub-district level
offices known as jiedao.
Street vendors and the chengguan are not the only actors involved in the growing protests and
contention over the streets and public spaces. Local citizens and other local officials such as the
police or government administrators are a part of the debates and are often drawn into
contentious activities, protests and collective actions. The next section explores how these social
actors and their interactions have shaped social segregation and spatial politics in the city.
Regulating Space: zero-tolerance, tolerated illegality, and contested spaces
As in other places, there are significant spatial politics that order the street activity in China
(Stillerman, 2006). In some spaces, chengguan and local authorities take a “let it be” approach
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creating spaces of tolerated illegality in which vendors can operate freely. In contrast, other
spaces are off-limits, chengguan and local authorities have a “clear it away” or “zero tolerance”
policy which keeps migrants and vending out. Finally, there are some spaces in-between, which
are grey areas, increasingly contested and characterized by clashes between chengguan and
migrants.
Spaces that have been established as “off-limits” have zero-tolerance for activities like informal
vending and are heavily policed with regulations strictly enforced. These spaces include popular
designated shopping districts such as the Wangfujing and Qianmen in Beijing, or Nanjinglu and
Huaihailu in Shanghai. They also include entertainment areas characterized by large storefronts,
pedestrian areas, and malls; all of which are generally zero-tolerance for street vending.
Sometimes, but not always, there are physical barriers that demarcate “zero tolerance” zones
including turnstiles, gates, walls, stairs, chains, barrier landscaping, entranceways, and archways.
Generally speaking, most migrants accept the boundaries of social segregation in the city and
avoid these areas. In part, this is because migrants are made to feel unwelcomed when they
venture into highly regulated spaces. 18 For example, Xiao Mei, a 22 year-old unregistered
migrant explains that she window shops to see the new styles and then returns home and orders
them online. Of course, the online version is much cheaper than what is in the stores, but she
insists they are “exact replicas.” I asked her if she has been in the mall in a popular shopping
district,
Xiao Mei: One time I went in the mall but I left quickly.
Interviewer: Why?
Xiao Mei: I felt uncomfortable. The walls were so high, the floors sparkled, and
everything was very expensive. People were dressed up and they all looked so
sophisticated (fancy). The store clerks all looked at me in a way that made me
uncomfortable. Really, I was afraid that if I stayed they would call the security guard
because anyone could see that I didn’t belong there (Personal Interview, August 1, 2009)
Another woman migrant concurs,
There are some shopping places that I feel comfortable and some that are uncomfortable.
Sometimes I go into stores where I cannot afford to buy things but it gives me ideas (for
style). I like to see what they have but when I want to buy something I go where I can
afford to shop (Personal interview, August 1, 2009).
They talk about how they don’t belong in the stores and how the people in those spaces actively
work to make them feel uncomfortable and out of place. These women continue to venture into
spaces that make them feel uncomfortable or places where they “don’t belong,” because they are
driven by aspirations to look or be “urban” and attempt to mimic the trends and fashions set by
the global middle-upper class citizens in the cities. 19 However, this doesn’t apply across the
board. Some migrants, especially unregistered migrants, don’t want to draw attention and instead
prefer to blend in with their surroundings. As one unregistered migrant explained,
Interviewer: Have you been shopping at Wangfujing?
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XiaoQing: Why would I go there? It is far from here and they don’t sell anything that I
need, anything that I can afford.
Interviewer: Have you gone window shopping there, you know, just for fun?
XiaoQing: I can window shop here. If I go there I am just looking for trouble. I can find
everything I need right here (in the enclave). My friends are here and I am too tired to
travel across the city to go there. That place isn’t for outsiders (Personal Interview,
August 15, 2009). 20
Unregistered migrants are aware of their lack of status but it become less important when they
are around other migrants and more important when they are in spaces that are “off-limits.” They
understand the potential implications of traversing the boundaries and as a result, they do a lot of
self-policing.
In contrast, there are other spaces in the city where officials and enforcement officers adopt a “let
it be” attitude creating spaces of “tolerated illegality” where illegal, but not necessarily criminal,
activity is widespread and accepted practice. The best examples of this are migrant enclaves
where vendors sometimes outnumber storefronts. Other such activities include growing gardens
in public or shared green areas, setting up and operating businesses or housing units without
proper permits and licenses, and littering or dumping garbage and waste. 21 These activities not
only happen in migrant enclaves but can also be found across cities in other unregulated or “let it
be” spaces such as alleyways, near transportation junctions, some public parks or squares and the
outskirts of cities.
Finally, there are also spaces in-between, grey areas that have become contested space.
Unregistered migrants, locals and city officials are increasingly clashing over who can occupy
the space and how it can be used. As the next section shows, contested space is often at the
boundaries of spaces of tolerated illegality but these boundaries change overtime as do the
interactions between migrants, locals and officials.
Struggles over the right to a livelihood: from Foucauldian freedom to exclusion
In 2004, I began to spend time with three specific groups of unregistered migrant women who
are vegetable and fruit sellers vending in different locations in Beijing. One group sells near a
subway stop on the “ring road” that circles Beijing center city, another group does vending on a
side street near a cluster of universities, and a third group is located right outside of a migrant
enclave on the northwest edge of the city. I chose to spend time with them, in part, because they
were located along my almost daily commute. However, as the analysis below will show, despite
their different locations, the struggles and issues they face are similar. During a year-long stint in
China, I was able to spend time with these women almost every week, sometimes every day. As
the years passed, I have returned to China periodically and each time included a visit with them
on my itinerary. Sometimes I would just visit for a few hours and sometimes I would stop by
each day for the period I was in town. The resulting longitudinal data captures changes in their
attitudes and perspectives about their work in the city and changes in their interaction with the
chengguan.
In 2004-5 these women did not see their lack of registration as a burden, and contrary to my
expectations, they even suggested there was a benefit to not being registered in the city. They
didn’t have to check in with the local district office and pay the registration fees. They viewed
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these fees as a waste of money because they believed there was no benefit to being registered.
They could evade family planning officials and they could, without bureaucratic interference,
pick up and move their work to a different part of the city or a different city altogether. These
“benefits” of not registering in the city collectively represent a kind of “Foucauldian freedom”
from the panoptic state apparatus.
This Foucauldian freedom did not preclude all interactions with the state. Migrant vendors,
because they operate in public spaces, still interacted with the chengguan who were charged with
regulating the streets. For example, one group of migrants set up their vending stands on a side
street near few major universities. They set up their stands everyday in the same spot according
to an established pecking order. 22 The chengguan would come along on a fairly regular basis,
usually once a week to issue fines to all the vendors. At that time the average fine was 30 kuai
(roughly $4 dollars) per vendor. One week the chengguan handed the migrants “pink slips”
documenting the infraction and the amount of the fine, and then the following week they came
by and collected money without giving receipts, the latter constituted an under the table
transaction. The women were not upset or angry about having to pay fines and bribes to the
chengguan. They explained that it was just another cost of doing business in the city and saw the
informal payments as “lunch money” for the chengguan which supplemented their low salaries.
When the chengguan ticketed the vendors it was a friendly and peaceful process. They arrived
and the vegetable sellers didn’t run or hide nor were they angry. Instead, they handed over the
money, joked with them and even offered them some free produce to bring back to their wives
for dinner.
In contrast, four or five years later in 2009, the way the migrants felt about their unregistered
status and their interactions with the chengguan had changed. Migrants were still feeling the
effects of a government initiated campaign that had been implemented to prepare the Capitol city
for the Olypmic games. This included “cleaning up” the streets and clearing unsightly
neighborhoods and people from the city which, for some of the migrants, brought up memories
from the SARS crisis and resulting purges. The group of women who were vending near the
university, many of them the same migrants who had been selling 4-5 years ago, continued
paying fines as usual. However, under the campaign they were also forced to shut down their
stalls on certain days; they complied. One difference was that they no longer framed these
interactions as being another “cost of doing business in the city,’ and instead, they now
complained about the chengguan “harassing and targeting migrants,” specifically them. However,
they felt like vending was their best option given that they were unregistered and lacked
connections. There were a host of reasons they gave as to why they couldn’t get registered such
as they needed formal housing, they were living in violation of the family planning laws, or they
didn’t have some necessary document. They also expressed suspicion in the registration system.
Finally, because they were unregistered migrants who were vending, they felt they had to suffer
the bad treatment from the chengguang, there was no alternative.
The boundaries of tolerated illegality were also changing. The group of women migrants who
were vending outside of an enclave on the outskirts of Beijing had not interacted very much with
the chengguan in 2004-05 but by 2009 they were complaining that the chengguan had started
doing regular patrols on their street, had increased sporadic raids of the enclave and were
threatening demolition. Again, they felt as if they had little choice but to comply given that they
10
were unregistered migrants who were vending. However, they were also very angry. They
complained about how it was unfair to be harassed by the chengguan given how far away they
were from the city center and the Beijing Olympic venues. This was an enclave and “migrant
area” which should be left alone. They talked about how the migrants were being “chased like
dogs” in the narrow streets of the enclave and rounded up, taken to the local police office where
they had to pay fines, suffer beatings, detainment and sometimes repatriation.
Most recently, in 2012, the boundaries of space had shifted again, as had the nature of the
interactions between the chengguan and the migrants. The group of women who had vending
near a subway stop on the “ring road” had been “cleared away,” as had a small enclave that was
not too far away. About half of the eight migrant women who had been vending near the
universities were different from the original cohort in 2004-5. The four women migrants who
had been selling vegetables over the last nine years suggested that the spot was now “unstable”
and “unprofitable” because of the “corrupt” chengguan. One women vendor from Heilongjiang
who had been there for five years was working to obtain a new spot for her stand in a migrant
enclave that was further away from the universities where she had heard the chengguan were
much less active. However, the majority of these women vendors were not interested in
relocating their businesses or leaving the cities.
Another important change occurred in their attitudes; these women no longer adhered to the idea
that they had no choice but to suffer the chengguan. They had become intent on developing and
using strategies to push the chengguan out of “their” space. In an effort to stop “corruption,” they
now refuse to pay fines without getting a receipt. In response, the chengguan sometimes moved
on to other migrants, but sometimes they used violence, hitting the women, destroying their
produce, and threatening to detain them. They would fight back with both verbal and sometimes
physical responses. In most cases they also pulled out their cell phones to visually record the
incidents. One woman vendor who had been vending by the university for about five years
explained that arguing with the chengguan might be expensive and painful in the short run but it
would save them a lot of money in the long-run. They refused to pay bribes because they didn’t
want to be “easy money” for the chengguan. They suggested that paying the bribes would only
keep them coming back, “more frequently, and asking for more money.”
The women also began to ignore requests by the chengguan to stop selling or move their stand.
They claimed their right to sell in that spot was de facto of having been there for years. One
woman was suspicious of the chengguan, convinced that they were trying to clear them away so
that they could gain control of the location and fill it with new vendors who would be willing to
pay higher “fees” for the prime spot and the chengguan turning a blind eye. The women also
forcefully stated that that they had a right to make a living in the city, that they were “hard
working,” distinguishing themselves from vagrants (mangliu), beggers (qigai) and criminals who
steal for a living (zuiren and pianren). One woman, who had been living in the city for many
years said, “…we are not demanding a hukou, we don’t care about the hukou, we want to make a
living (Personal Interview, July 2, 2012).” These small battles and daily struggles with the
chengguan are increasingly punctuated with larger more explosive protests.
As the saliency of these struggles for a right to the cities, a right to the streets, and a right to a
livelihood increase, more of these daily interactions between street vendors and the chengguan
11
are evolving into larger protests or devolving into riots. I present three such events to illustrate a
few key points. In September 2011, in Kunming city, Yunnan province a female vendor with a
baby had a tussle with the local chengguan. When the baby was hurt, an older male vendor
stepped in to break up the fight. In turn, he was brutally beaten by seven or eight chengguan with
steel pipes and clubs. When the chengguan tried to flee the scene, local witnesses smashed their
vehicle windows and prevented them from leaving. In the meanwhile, roughly a hundred or so
street vendors had congregated on the scene. They followed the chengguan to the local police
office and demanded justice (Chen, 2011). Altercations between street vendors and the
chengguan that include physical violence again migrants are common. It is also increasingly
common to have people (both migrants and locals) get involved, either directly by trying to stop
the violence, or indirectly, by capturing events on video or in photographs and posting them on
the internet via social media.
In contrast, in other cases migrants plan and orchestrate protests. In Wuhan city, Hebei province
migrant street vendors turned to performance art to protest their treatment. This took the form of
ten men marching a “dead” body through the streets to mourn the loss and condemn violence on
the part of the chengguan. The protestors placed the body at the doorstep of the local chengguan
office. Many members of the public didn’t realize that it was a protest action and mistakenly
thought that they were carrying a real dead body. The angry response forced local officials to
make a public statement during which they reminded people, including the press, that these
migrants were “illegally occupying the streets,” and despite warnings, they persisted (Global
Times, 2013). These kinds of organized protests, as opposed to spontaneous protests, are
growing in numbers and vary in size and form.
Finally, there are some cases of protest which have had such a widespread impact they present
the possibility that these struggles are tapping into broader elements of discontent which could
have a more a revolutionary potential. The most well known example is the case of a watermelon
vendor, Deng, who many feared would become the Chinese equivalent of Mohamed Bouazizi,
the Tunisian street vendor who is credited with igniting the Jasmine Revolution. 23
In July 2013, in Chenzhou, a city in the south-central province of Hunan, a peasant couple was
selling their produce in the city when the chengguan arrived, fined them, and took some
watermelons. Later in the day, they had a second interaction with the chengguan. This time there
was a physical altercation that ended with the death of the husband and a severe injury to the
wife. The chengguan immediately claimed that the famer had suddenly “dropped dead without
provocation.” Onlookers filming the incident had their phones confiscated and smashed by the
chengguan but some photos made it onto the internet. In response, the general public expressed
outrage on social media outlets such as weibo in record numbers. 24 Following the incident,
thousands of people surrounded the dead body to prevent local law enforcement from taking it,
fearing that they would dispose of it and other evidence of wrongdoing. Eventually, the police
literally beat their way through the crowd to recover the body, which provided more fodder for
the internet. Under pressure and the watchful public eye, they agreed to conduct an autopsy in
the presence of the family. Anger continued even after the family was offered a large settlement
from the government. 25 Rather than the case fading into the background as most do, two local
officials in the chengguan office were dismissed and eventually four officers stood trial and were
sent to jail. This incident is an example of how public anger and commentary can influence the
12
outcome of events, which in this case, included holding the chengguan responsible for their
actions.
All three examples show the different ways that interactions between the migrants and
chengguan evolve, or sometimes devolve, into protest. They also reveal how these struggles,
while between migrant vendors and the chengguan, include many other actors such as bystanders,
other migrants, the general public and state officials. They show how the right to be in the city
and the right to a livelihood, both political rights, are becoming increasingly salient and the
struggles more contentious.
Conclusion: Political rights and China’s emerging urban citizenship regime
China’s emerging urban citizenship and spatial politics are bounded by the hukou system and
scholars have shown how, under this system, migrants become second class citizens in the cities
as they are denied access to most public goods and social entitlements. This article shifts our
attention to struggles over political rights, specifically the right to be in the city and the right to a
livelihood, showing how they are becoming increasingly salient and contentious. It focuses on
unregistered migrants and shows how, despite their lack of formal urban citizenship or residency,
they are increasingly making normative claims about their right to occupy the streets and to
make a living which are the basis of increasing contentious clashes with public security officers
(chengguan).
This analysis provides several reasons why migrant struggles over their rights to occupy the
streets and to make a living in the cities are becoming salient and contentious. Most obviously,
the numbers of both street vendors and chengguan have dramatically increased, which leads to
more interactions between them. Second, migrants’ perspectives on both the chengguan and their
situation in the cities have changed over time, making them willing, even intent, on struggling
for their right to occupy the streets and make a living. Third, these migrants cannot get licenses
as vendors, remaining easy targets of the chengguan. Finally, their lack of status in the city
means that they cannot utilize established sanctioned claims-making avenues such as the courts,
legal aid centers, NGOs, complaint lines, petitions, and visits to local officials. This shapes the
form of their struggles, all of which are outside of sanctioned channels, including direct clashes
with the chengguan, riots, performance protests, and organized street protests.
This study also points us towards the need for further research on the politics behind these
clashes, including a deeper understanding of men who become chengguan and how we
understand the complicated relationship between the state and the chengguan. The chengguan, if
they are primarily laid-off state-owned enterprise workers and newly unemployed, represent an
important group of disenfranchised workers. This raises questions about these clashes: are they
clashes between two distinctly different groups of disenfranchised workers, between urban
citizens and migrants, or between the state and migrants? If the chengguan represent a group that
lost out in the reform era as socialist promises have been abandoned, how does this shape their
actions and interactions with migrants? The chengguan are not police nor are they independent
of the state, which raises important questions about how their mandate and priorities are shaped,
and by whom.
These migrants in China are part of a growing global population living precarious lives in urban
peripheries without citizenship and without legal or regular residency. They are increasingly
13
important, yet invisible, but their existence challenges nation-based conceptions of citizenship.
At the same time, their daily practices and routines become the basis of normative claimsmaking in their struggles for urban citizenship. It grounds the spatial aspects of their struggles;
they informally occupy the streets as vendors and, over time, they claim the right to the streets
and the right to a livelihood based on established past practice. This directly clashes with urban
development that, driven by neo-liberal principles, shifts spatial boundaries as it remakes
districts and neighborhoods, and attempts to relocate noncitizens into new spaces of invisibility.
Funding
This work was supported by a Language & Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship through the
Department of Education, administered by the Title VI National Resource Center at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison; a Junior Faculty Grant in the Social and Behavioral Sciences,
Wayne State University.
14
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16
1
This article, following established protocol, presents Chinese words by using the pinyin
phonetic system to spell words with the Latin alphabet. These words are italicized to indicate that
they are part of a foreign language. Please contact the author if you would like the Chinese
character representation or if you have any questions.
2
This is not a temporary phenomenon as some migrants have lived in the cities for a decade or
more and still remain temporary migrants without urban citizenship.
3
Since migrants still hold rural hukous, their access to social welfare, public goods, and
entitlements remained linked to their hometowns.
4
In some cities, they are allowed to access these public goods but they must pay higher fees than
locals which make its cost prohibitive.
5
A weak form of political citizenship is membership in a political community (in this sense
membership and legal status in the city) but a strong form of political citizenship refers to the
right to participate in and exercise political power. In this article I am referring to a weak form of
political citizenship, which, I argue is important and powerful in the context of China.
6
. In the few cases where migrants manage to jump the hurdles and pay the exorbitant fees, their
children are allowed to attend school but remain segregated and experience discrimination.
7
These visits and related data collection was part of a larger study on migrant workers, not just
unregistered street workers; only some of the collected data is used in this analysis.
8
A mix of random and convenience sampling was used to locate interview subjects.
9
Interview data is supplemented with observational data and participant observation that was
collected across time and place. Observational data range from the mundane including noting
characteristics of the area where the vending was taking place, the price of goods, the different
components of the work to the extraordinary such as notes documenting dramatic interactions
between vendors, the local enforcement officials, and local citizens. Participant observation
included having the opportunity to would take over vending stands to relieve women while they
ran errands, went to get lunch, or just sat back and took a break.
10
Of the 283 million people employed in urban areas, 168 million were working in the informal
economy.
11
However, since it is not licensed or regulated, it is impossible to calculate how many people
work in this occupation.
12
Again, there are no surveys or statistics available on street vendors in China’s cities. The
demographic description in this paragraph emerges from the data which is not random or
generalizable. This is a demographic description from my qualitative data gathered over the
years from interactions and interviews with migrant vendors mainly in Beijing, but also in
Guangzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai and Wuhan.
17
13
There is some evidence to suggest that the number of urban citizens who participated in street
vending decreased after 2002 when Zhu Rongji expanded the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee
program but also created penalties for those who participated in informal work (Solinger, 2011).
14
These are generalizations not hard and fast rules. The gendered division of labor may vary
across place.
15
The full Chinese name of this office is called the chengshi guanli xingzheng zhifaju which can
be translated as the “City Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement. However, this office and
the associated officers are colloquially referred to as the “chengguan.”
16
Sometimes this is the same office as the chengguan and other times it is a different with
overlap in mandates.
17
In this sense, clashes between the chengguan and migrant vendors are clashes between two
groups of disenfranchised workers.
18
Private businesses are sometimes even more direct in policing these boundaries, literally
hanging signs that say “no migrants allowed” and they hire private security to enforce their
wishes.
19
See Chang LT (2008) Factory girls: from village to city in a changing China, New York:
Spiegel & Grau.
20
Migrants are often referred to as “outsiders.”
21
There is also illegal activity happening in the enclaves such as prostitution, gambling, stealing,
etc. However, illegal activity is not the focus of this study.
22
In two of the vending sites, most of the vegetable vendors packed up their vegetables at the end
of the night and stored them in a safe place but left their tables. Some of the fruit vendors had
constructed temporary shacks behind the table and live there through the spring, summer and fall.
Therefore, the tables were there 24/7, leaving the impression that this was a permanent activity.
23
He was a Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire in 2010 in protest to harassing
treatment and confiscation of his goods. His act has been labeled as the catalyst of the Arab
Spring.
24
Weibo is China’s version of twitter.
25
Some believed that the settlement was a payoff to the family and that the family had little
choice in what they could do at that point. Therefore, the payoff and burial didn’t quell public
anger and commentary.
18