In Rethinking Street Vending, Krishnendu Ray talks about the relationship between street vendors and cities. It is pointed out that “street vendors bring life to dull streets, yet urban planners often describe street vending as a manifestation of both poverty and underdevelopment, so that its disappearance is viewed a progress toward the brave new developed world of universal prosperity.” Also, “urban self-employment is essential to the mix of economic opportunities for the poor”, and “one of the most ubiquitous occupations people have when they move from the country to the city, small town to large city, or even across nations, is street vending because it requires relatively little money or credit or social or cultural capital to get into the business of selling food.” These remind me of a piece of news I saw recently that a wet market in Wuhan is now undergoing an upgrading process. One of the new regulations that is going to take effect along with the upgrading process is that female vendors who are over 45 and male vendors who are over 50 will not be allowed to do street vending in this market. This particular new regulation makes a lot of vendors confused: they think this regulation is too high and unreasonable; at the age of around 50, they depend on selling fresh vegetables to make a living, and if they are not allowed to do so anymore, what else can they do?
Many people have expressed their views on social media about this news. “Why is it that even doing street vending and selling vegetables can have an age limit?” ” What can those over 45 and unemployed people do now?” “So does this mean that those aged 30-40 should become street vendors selling vegetables?” “Those street vendors are typically elder people who are jobless and want to make a living by doing street vending, do the guys who make this rule ever go to a wet market?” Most people think this new regulation is not fair and lack enough consideration of the situation. There has been a heated discussion toward this news since its was exposed on the Internet, and this has pressured the related government department to give a response. Luckily the market was required by the government department to rescind this regulation so those elder street vendors do not have to worry about thins anymore.
In fact, the new set of regulations aims to make the overall environment of the market better, to have standard management so that it can have good order. In doing so, previous stereotype like wet markets are messy and dirty could be changed. It is not wrong to have the market upgraded to become a better place, but this does not mean that any regulations considered too rigorous can be implemented without any opposing voices. Under the present circumstance where everything in China is starting to recover from Covid-19, it is even more important to give more tolerance and understanding to street vendors to help them get through this hard period of time.
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