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As a kind of informal economy, the controversy around street food never stops. Many people have a nostalgia feeling about street foods, they are supportive of “street culture” and object to the strict governmental regulation about street vendors. “Informal economy is the people’s spontaneous and creative response to the state’s incapacity to satisfy the basic needs of the impoverished masses”, and street food not only provides a survival mode for the urban poor but also expresses a city’s “liveliness” and cultural charm, why should we forbid them? Okay, then let’s have a hypothesis here: what would happen if we permit all the street foods? Would there be uncontrollable problems if street food becomes “legal”?

1. The environmental problem

Many people enjoy the street food provided by the stalls, however, when the mobile vendors left the spot, there are always thick oil stains covered the ground. The stain is sticky and a lot of garbage stick to it and attracts the flies, which greatly affects the surrounding environment. If pedestrians walk on it, their shoes would be stuck to the stains, and difficult to walk through the area. So there has to be someone to clean up the mess. If it’s not the street vendors themselves, who would that be? Yes, the sanitation workers. In a news report, a sanitation worker Ms. Xu told the reporter that it was hard for her to clean up the oil stains. She had to prepare two brooms, one for the normal ground, and a special one to sweep the contaminated ground. She had to undertake the extra workload every day because she was “in charge of the area”. Consider about that: is street food legal a good idea for all the urban poor?

two sanitation workers try to clean up the oil stains

 

2. The safety problem

If you observe the street food stalls carefully, you could find out that most of them fire up the cooking stove with gas cans. It could be very dangerous if the gas cans are not been formally used (eg. placed near the open fire), but lots of street food vendors did not care much about the safety issue even though lots of gas can explosion cases have already happened. I read about an interview on this issue. A journalist was investigating several street food stalls and found out that most of the gas cans been use were stained with oil and full of rust, and many gas cans are even directly connected to the stove. He asked a street vendor, “your gas can and gas stove looks very old, could it still be used?” The vendor hesitated and said vaguely that although it has been used for many years, it would not cause any safety problems. In fact, the journalist asked many street food vendors about the service maintenance of their gas cans, but few of them care about that. Some even said, “as long as you don’t knock it over, it should be OK.” In this situation, the safety of the street food is not guaranteed, and those food stalls with non-standard gas cans become “time bombs” lurk around us and threaten the safety of every pedestrian.

This is a Chinese report of a gas can explosion that happened in Shandong: https://www.sohu.com/a/132205699_700231. From the video, we could see that a huge flame suddenly burst out, and the fire flashed into the sky with a radiation range of four meters. Five people were severely burned in the accident, including two children…

A lot of problems also exist: the food safety problem, the traffic block problem, and the unfair competition it would bring to the substantial restaurants… It seems that we still have a long way to go to turn the street food economy into a kind of “heroic entrepreneurship”.

Late night life in Chongqing is different from any other cities. Although Chongqing has clubs and bars, they are not the final destination of their weekend life. ShaokaoTan, the Chinese BBQ, or the late-night street vendor, is always the last stop before anyone go home and end their weekend night. Shaokao is the soul of Chongqing’s night life. When I was young, many ShaokaoTan street vendors are mobile. They move from one place to another to find customers. Most of ShaokaoTan located near bars and clubs or near shopping center, because that’s where they can find more customers. There are also “secret ShaokaoTan.” Those street vendors are usually hard to find. They may hide behind buildings or customers have to walk across a narrow alley to get there.

 

However, after I grow up. Many ShaokaoTan disappeared. Some of them move to other places, but others give up doing this business because of government regulations. Chengguan and other police administrations officers view those street vendors as illegal business owners, especially during Wang LiJun era. Wang Lijun is a Chinese former police chief in Chongqing. For political reasons, he and Bo Xilai, the former Communist Party Secretary of Chongqing, hope to bring Chongqing “new blood” by rebuilding the city’s outlook. Wang LiJun build hundreds of outside police stations to create a “safe Chongqing”, and at the same time throw out a lot of street vendors, because those street vendors don’t fit the image of new Chongqing. Shaokao Tan street vendors are scared of opening their business because police stations are usually located near shopping centers, bars and clubs. Mobile ShaokaoTan gradually disappeared but occasionally they will appear near Karaoke places.

Few years ago, Chongqing established a policy only for street vendors regulations. The policy has specific requirements for legal street vendors. Street vendors must have a license to open their businesses, but there are limitations for food categories. For example, health care products, children food and alcohol are not allowed as small businesses or street vendors.  Besides, street vendors must have a physical location to open their businesses, which means they must have a store to make food. This policy may be the strictest one for mobile ShaoKaoTan street vendors. Mobile ShaoKao Tan always make BBQ on their cars, where they put a grill and use charcoal to set up fire. Although their “kitchen” are visible and small, sometimes those grills may not look that clean, street vendors don’t have to pay for the rental fee. However, if they need a physical store, they have to pay for the high rent. Most Shaokao Tan owners are Dibaohu, and their small businesses are usually run by a couple or a family of three or four. They use their Shaokao Tan to make a living for a whole family, but paying rent for a physical location is too expensive for them.

Wenjun Fang (wf646)

Social media and modern stall culture in China

It became a new trend to discover different night markets for the young generation in China. When you search ‘Night Market’ on a Chinese social media platform, you can easily find a lot of information with great images about the night markets that happened all over the nation. It became a stylish entertaining way for young people and a part of the new and fashionable lifestyle that is popular among the young generation.

 

The night market that is popular today looks different than the traditional night market in our memories. It always has a theme and usually unified on colors. Everything there looks tidy and neat, with wonderful decorations and furniture. Signboards are designed by the stall vendors themselves, which are full of creative ideas. Sophisticated handicrafts are the most common stuff in modern night markets. Within the popularity of ‘Chinese Style’ in recent years, traditional Chinese handicrafts like embroidery, paper cutting, and traditional hand-made jewelry all became the ‘must-go’ part of a modern night market.

Half of the vendors sell different kinds of elegant and fancy little goods, while the other half offers drinks and food. Unlike the traditional night market, people can easily find exotic ethnic cuisine here. Italian crepes, Mexico taco, yogurt cup with fruit and oat, as well as coffee with alternative oat milk…There are also stalls selling food and snacks that are common in China. Still, the vendors will pack the food in a fancy package, or the stall will have a modern concept on stall designing.

Such modern night markets are usually located in the midst of the city. Convenient transportation and modern design can easily attract many young people to visit, shop, take photos, and share on social media. Those posts will soon attract the second round of visitors who read those posts online. The trend happened when we are not recognizing. ‘Pop-up market’ is also the marketing concept that is usually used by those nigh markets. The organizer trying to attract as many visitors as possible quickly will get the highest return rate since they usually need to pay high rent and hire extra staff on site. It is more like an event that people can be shopping, socializing, and exploring something new, while the traditional night market is more an open-air shopping mall for people to solve the need for daily life. They are offering cheap and hot food as well as affordable clothes and daily supplies. Among the goods sold in the traditional night market, it’s a more realistic perspective on the world we live in.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDG0ZwVXsXMhttp://

This video showing one of the most famous night market in Shanghai right now, which located at the Jingan Temple, called the Anyi Night Market.

Doubtless, informal economy is essential part of economy in China. Although claimed as socialism, the current economic system is a hybrid involving planned economy and market-oriented economy. After the reform of state-owned enterprises in 1990s, laid-off workers started to earn their own livelihood on the streets. It opens up the booming of street vending that many of my generation have experienced during our childhood.

After almost 20-year development, street venders are no longer only those who were laid off in 1990s, but their children, migrant workers, and veterans. Veterans and their families prevail in street food, family-run restaurants in small scale, and family inns in the rural-urban continuum. A few years ago, almost in every city before the city appearance management gains popularity among administers, there would always be restaurants and street food named after “veterans’ friendship” (Zhanyouqing), such as Veterans’ Friendship BBQ. Often, for those informal economic practices, the husbands or the fathers are veterans, but the business is operated by the whole family including wives, parents, and even parents-in-law.

Military service in China is volunteer. Veterans from poor families firstly consider performing military service when they become high school graduate. If they are unlikely to be admitted in universities or colleges, their parents probably would send those boys to army, as army is regarded as a good place to make tough men and make sure they wouldn’t go wrong. However, military training doesn’t include professional training or career development. After they leave the army with subsidies (usually several thousand yuan), those veterans neither have a higher academic degree nor professional skills. Therefore, it is hard for them to apply for a job in the formal economy, though the policy might grant them some benefits.

Another factor is traditional culture requires males to establish their own career and start a family as the symbol that boys become men. When they leave the army, they are in their twenties at which age their parents would push them to start a family. If so, they are eager to start a career to support their own families. If not, they still need a career to fulfill the requirements in the “marriage market” (not a monetary market, but a series of conditions to find a “nice” girl to start a family).

When suffering from finding a job in the formal economy, they tend to utilize their subsidies in street vending by their own. Informal economy requires low-level skills and represents “work more and get more”, which would fit in aptly veterans’ conditions.

There used to be a widespread phenomenon in Beijing called Kai Qiang Da Dong (开墙打洞), which would be “hole through the wall” if translated directly into English. The so-called Kai Qiang Da Dong means that the residents on the first floor of the residential building pierced through the original window’s bottom edge to turn the window into a doorway and let the doorway face the road. In this way, the original residential room could be used for commercial purposes. The housing could be changed into stores, barbershops, small restaurants, etc. Some people run the store by themselves, and some rent the space to others. There are many benefits to opening stores in a residential building. One of the most important advantages is that the source of the customer is guaranteed. Such commercial space usually provides day daily service to nearby neighborhoods, and the shop manager is always seen as an acquaintance of the customer instead of a merchant. Kai Qiang Da Dong is illegal by law because, as the window becomes a doorway, the room above’s support is weakened, creating a risk that may endanger the upper floors. However, the commercial space creates through Kai Qiang Da Dong undeniably provides much convenience to the neighborhood and offers jobs to low-class people living in urban cities.

 

The phenomenon of Kai Qiang Da Dong has appeared as far back as the 1990s but was largely ignored and acquiesced by the government until 2017. In 2017, the mayor of Beijing Cai Qi enacted policies to combat the behavior of Kai Qiang Da Dong. The government not only banned any further Kai Qiang Da Dong in Beijing but also torn down those restaurants and shops that were previously created by Kai Qiang Da Dong and restored the wall. According to Sohu’s news release, tens of thousands of shops and restaurants were forced to close down because of this government action. Such action was aimed to clean up the city but caused discontent among Beijing residents. Many restaurants that run for decades and enjoyed great reputations among their loyal customers had to change their addresses. It was especially an annoying shift for older people who were not familiar with internet technology and more used to local shops and restaurants. The torn down of those shops and restaurants is also the deprivation of their living space in the city.

(Banners with slogans of against Kai Qiang Da Dong put on the street by the government)

People who were affected even more badly than older people are those low-class workers in Beijing. Many of them didn’t own a Beijing Hu Kou and came to Beijing to find jobs. The torn down of the spaces created by Kai Qiang Da Dong is literally the destruction of their living basis. The shops and restaurants created by Kai Qiang Da Dong are usually small and run by families who work and live there at the same time. After no longer being able to run business in Beijing, many low-class families couldn’t afford to pay the rent and moved out of Beijing. Thus the combat against Kai Qiang Da Dong is also the action of dispelling low-class people in Beijing and blocking social mobility.

（Construction team demolishing stores created by Kai Qiang Da Dong）

In my own opinion, the combat against Kai Qiang Da Dong is the claim of power of the government authority. It indeed entails some good intentions of creating a more neat and clean city space. However, it violates the most basic responsibility that a city (especially a capital city) should take, which is enabling every resident to earn a living in the city. In this sense, the Beijing government’s action reflects the capital city as a place where the state apparatus exerts its power instead of a public space owned by the people.

Here is a video of a girl’s tour to the previous Kai Qiang Da Dong restaurant and her interview with the restaurant owner.

 

Yesterday, I went to get my trousers cut down at a tailor near my home, which is located in a historical longtangin the city center. In Shanghai, there exists a considerable number of longtang across the crowded shopping streets and luxury malls. People who live in these old longtang are in harsh living conditions all year round, including the tailor I visited. Dwelling on the first floor at the deep end of a longtang, her restroom and cooktop——without a complete kitchen——were both outdoor, with the air in the courtyard filled with awful smell from the toilet. The tailor lived in a dirty, narrow room where she came down from a dark attic if any customer called her at the wooden door. Having known that the prices of goods are remarkably high in the area and intended to find a cheap place to alter my clothes, I searched on Dianping, a store review app resembling Yelp, and found this nameless, hard-to-find shop. Yet the tailoring service was surprisingly expensive, though it might be more unaffordable in the malls. But the location and environment of her store decide that she may merely do business with regular customers and the neighborhood, I assume.

a repair stall in the longtang

a tailor stall in the longtang

inside the tailor’s room

It reminds me that in Guangzhou, many hawkers were forced to move indoors after the prohibition of street vending. They, who normally live in the aged residential areas or pay at low rents, set up stalls selling grocery, providing repairing and other neighborhood services (bianmin fuwu) in the lanes or in the staircases of the first floor of old buildings along the streets. Unlike vendors who are customer-friendly and could flexibly approach places with a high flow of pedestrian traffic, those expelled hawkers are even more disadvantaged than small shopkeepers, for they may not have any strong capital except low prices to maintain nearby customers.

Solinger concludes that in China the urban poor after the Reform and Opening-up mainly consists of three kinds: rural migrants; less-educated employees who once worked in state-owned enterprises but were thrown aside when the firms turned private or shut down (xiagang gongren); educated youth (zhiqing) that were once “sent down” to the countryside in the Cultural Revolution and returned to the cities after the chaotic period. The latter two are in fact sacrifice of the social changes and economic transformation. They were once praised as “sacrosanct proletariats” for their selfless contribution to the Communist Party and industrial sectors in early years but then turned into “burden” when private enterprises and global economy accelerated after 1978. They lost their jobs in middle age and due to a lack of education, skills, and energy, it was extremely difficult for them to be re-employed. Since many of them had been allocated with small apartments (laogongfang) in the period of planned economy, they still have a right to live in the cities, but they are deprived of the right to earn a living. As a result, they were restricted in those tiny, dark spaces and became increasingly invisible to the public. The tailor might once be a worker in a state-owned plant and the overcrowded room she lives in was part of the laogongfang, if I got it right.

Far worse, since there is inadequate legal protection for these urban poor and most of them fail to meet required standards of dibaohu, some have taken extreme actions to express their dissatisfaction and anger towards the social injustice. I remembered that when I was in middle school, news about the miserable urban poor setting off bomb in public spaces occasionally happened (read here:https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/24/world/asia/china-petitioners-florcruz/index.html). Such incidents occur less in recent years, but I am not sure whether it is because their living conditions have been improved or news are more strictly censored. Yet I notice that social media and store review apps like Dianping indeed make the move-indoor peddlers visible again. One one hand, just by uploading several photos of the store and entering information like name of the store, business scope, location, and operation status , which requires little capital, the store would be displayed on the apps.

add store information on Dianping

On the other hand, some vendors have managed to build good reputations for their prominent skills and craftmanship and gained high scores and therefore higher rankings on the apps, exposing their stalls more easily to the users when they browse. Others are recommended by influential lifestyle or food KOLs, which in turn brings more traffic to the stalls.

a stall providing neighborhood services titled itself “trendy store with 5-star review on Dianping”

a local tailor stall recommended by a Red (xiaohongshu) user