Abstract
This article investigates the state regulation of motorcycle taxis in Guangzhou, China. Motorcycle taxis play an important role in sustaining the livelihood of a subgroup of urban migrants. However, this urban informality has become the object of strict state regulation after the use of motorcycle was outlawed by the Guangzhou Municipal Government. This article examines how dominant representations and discourses of motorcycle mobility are implicated in the right to urban streets. On the one hand it argues that both motorcycle mobility and the motorcycle taxi are socially-produced categories made visible and intelligible through the state-led programmes to ground them in a terrain of constructed knowledge. On the other hand, it is contended that the production of ideologically charged representations and knowledge catalyzes and constitutes the spatialisation of state regulatory power. In particular, this article examines the street-level regulatory practices and how these practices restructure both social relations and state power. It indicates that the local police’s regulation of motorcycle taxis cannot be sufficiently explained merely in terms of state domination and oppression. Instead, it is anchored in the highly moralised imperative of defending the ‘good’, the ‘ordered’ and the ‘respectable’.
Introduction
In the city of Guangzhou, China, the taxi service provided by motorcycles accomplishes a unique form of short-distance, flexible transport mobility bridging major nodes in the public transport network with under-connected neighbourhoods and workplaces. Operated almost exclusively by rural-to-urban migrants in the city, motorcycle taxis have played the central role in sustaining the livelihood of a marginalised urban social group. However, this particular form of informal, commodified urban transportation has become the object of strict state regulation since the use of motorcycles was outlawed wholesale by the municipal government of Guangzhou in the 2000s. Although this urban by-law failed to eradicate the business of motorcycle taxis altogether, it has nonetheless placed this particular form of urban mobility at the juncture of local political/legal power, disciplinary practices of the local police and the various terrains of discursive productions.
This article examines the regulation of motorcycle taxis from the perspectives of discourse production and state police power (Blomley, 2011). It employs an analytical point of entry built from recent debates on the politics of mobility, and interrogates its relation to the disciplining of urban streets. It starts from an overview of the recent studies on the discursive production of mobile practices and places its focus on the ways in which dominant knowledge and ideologies delineate the right to urban spaces and constitute rationalities of governmental practices. This article suggests that both motorcycle mobility and the motorcycle taxi are socially produced categories made visible and intelligible through the state’s and society’s programmes to ground them in a terrain of intricate discourses and constructed knowledge. It is argued that the production of ideologically charged representations and knowledge catalyses and shapes the spatialisation of regulatory power and the enactment of spatial barriers. For this reason, this article also examines the street-level regulatory practices of the local state and how these practices result in the restructuring of social relations and local state power.
Overall, this article argues that competing imaginations and visions of urban mobilities come into play by working through ideas of what are the appropriate ways in which urban spaces should be used and appropriated. Since dominant social power tends to exclude from urban streets those mobile practices discursively constructed as deviant and uncivilised, the construction of space and power is intrinsically implicated in visions of mobilities. Regulatory practices in Guangzhou are justified not merely by the coercive nature of state power, but a regime of soft power constituted by seemingly politically neutral representations, discourses and rationalities.
Motorcycle mobility in Guangzhou has been problematised only because it is present in, and rewrites the routinised meanings of, particular urban spaces. As the edited volume by Fyfe (1998) has lucidly indicated, the urban street, as a specific form of public space, is inherently contested, as different groups all strive to define its very publicness, namely the ways in which it is used, envisioned and shaped by the urban citizenry. In Guangzhou, it is mobility on the street that casts into sharp relief the tensions between mundane spatial practices and ideals of order, civility and modernity that space is expected to embody, thus catalysing ongoing redefinition and reproduction of public space.
Arguably, the broad context of the regulation of motorcycle taxis is the emerging cosmopolitan modernity of major Chinese cities and the arising regime of neoliberal urban governance (He and Wu, 2009). China’s economic reform heralded unprecedented urban growth and restructuring. A generally concurred argument in extant literature suggests that, in the post-reform era, economic development is prioritised by the Chinese state as a primary source of political legitimacy (Wu, 2010). The city as a built environment is increasingly mobilised as central to capital accumulation, in order to overcome the constraints in state-led industrialisation (Wu, 2007). This point of view is echoed by various attempts to understand Chinese local state via conceptualisations such as local state corporatism (Oi, 1992) and urban entrepreneurialism (Duckett, 1998). Surely, Guangzhou is no exception to this development-oriented logic, and has spearheaded ambitious projects of urban modernisation since the 1980s (Xu and Yeh, 2005).
The entrepreneurial regime of urban governance is closely bound up with an obsession with the marketing of city images. In the processes of branding favourable city images and thus attracting increasingly footloose global capital, social groups which are already marginalised in an unjust political economy often fall victim to stricter regulation. Zhang (2001a, 2001b), for example, has analysed how rural-to-urban migrants and their informal economic practices were associated with disorderliness and criminality. Socially constructed ideas and knowledge provided justification for the rationalisation of urban spaces, in the form of relentless demolition of migrant settlements. More recently, the regulation of street vendors has also been analysed by scholars such as Huang et al. (2014). Although little has been said about the regulation of mobilities in urban China, extant studies on the control of marginal groups, such as the works of Zhang (2001a, 2001b), have attested the closely knitted entanglement of state power, discourse and visions of social order in a rapidly neoliberalising and diversifying Chinese society. This urgent need to engage with the cultural and discursive dimensions of governance impels me to draw theoretical toolkits from the literatures on mobility politics and the discursive constitution of state power.
The regulation of motorcycle taxis opens up a lens to probe into the historical contingencies of citizenship and the right to the city. Lefebvre’s (1996) idea of the right to the city consists of not only more equal distribution of social welfare but, more importantly, the right to determine the use and value of urban space ‘after our heart’s desire’ (Harvey, 2003: 930). Qian and He’s (2012) discussion of the structural marginality of socialist workers, rural migrants and urban redevelopment displacees evidences that the right to the city is a useful conceptual contour for capturing the social and political realities in post-reform China. In Chinese cities, it is often the local state which possesses monopolistic power in manipulating the production of social identities and urban spaces, which goes hand in hand with the exclusion of the voices of grassroots social members.
As He and Chen (2012) have proposed, in the context of urban China, the right to the city needs to encompass multiple layers of political connotations. On the one hand, it is underscored by the fuller recognition of citizenship and rights to various forms of social welfare and legal protection. On the other hand, however, the right to the city also relies on the radical restructuring of social life around the use value, rather than exchange value, of urban spaces (Qian and He, 2012). With regards to either dimension in He and Chen’s (2012) conceptualisation, the purge of motorcycles from urban streets can be viewed as deprivation of the right to the city – it not only violates the legal rights to use one’s property and make movements in the city, but also privileges the exchange values generated by place-making initiatives over the use values borne by everyday practices and experiences.
Mobility politics, discursive government and local state power
Sketching a politics of mobility
Mobility creates opportunities for social members to crisscross established socio-spatial borders and enables opportunities of encounter, contestation and negotiation (Urry, 2000). Therefore, it reconstitutes social relations and shapes dynamics of political struggles (Sheller and Urry, 2006). Particularly notable is the fact that mobility is intrinsically ideological, and deeply embedded in webs of discourses and representations (Adey, 2010). There are always sets of knowledge which are claimed, usually by more powerful social groups, to reflect the ‘nature’ and ‘realities’ of specific mobile practices. Individuals or groups differentially positioned in social hierarchies may produce radically distinct representations and geographical imaginations of particular mobilities. Meanwhile, the production of discourses and ideological meanings is socially mediated. It is often changes in social contexts and relations that potentially catalyse the discursive reconstruction of mobilities.
Notably, in the production of normative discourses and representations, not all mobile practices are considered equally appropriate, civilised or desirable (Cresswell, 2001). While certain mobile practices are considered appropriate and endowed with full access to social resources, others are thoroughly restricted and regulated. Morally charged categories of mobile practices are constituted within geometries of social power which determine why certain forms of mobilities are excluded from hegemonic definitions of civilisation, culture and space (Jensen, 2011; Manderscheid, 2009). Kaplan’s (1996) research on the romanticisation of nomadism in high modernity and Cresswell’s (2001) study of the moral panic over placeless tramps in late 19th century America are illustrative of the positive or negative meanings and cultural connotations attached to given mobile practices.
What is closely intertwined with the production of discourse is often the multifaceted regulation of mobilities. Although mobility is an increasingly salient feature of the age of globalisation, experiences of stillness have, ironically, been thoroughly incorporated into systems of mobilities (Cresswell, 2012). At a macroscopic level, the regulation of cross-border mobilities is essential to the consolidation of nation-states and political power of sovereign states (Nash et al., 2010). As Cunningham (2004) argues, global mobility and connectivity have remained highly stratified and regulated. Restrictions of mobility are frequently imposed upon refugees (Hyndman, 2000), women (Bieri and Gerodetti, 2007), racialised others (Hague, 2010) and people suspected of having contagious diseases (Budd et al., 2011). Similarly, Hoskins and Maddern’s (2011) compelling analysis of Ellis Island and Angel Island Immigrations Stations traces the histories of how Asian migrants were framed in state discourses as threats to public health and social orders, and therefore subject to detention and confinement.
At a microscopic level, ideological and moral hierarchies also exist among various forms of urban mobilities. Regulated mobilities include, among others, those of shipping containers (Cidell, 2012), young drivers (Lumsden, 2013), street vendors (Meneses-Reyes, 2013) and new means of urban transport (Knuts and Delheye, 2012). This body of research echoes Binnie et al.’s (2007: 170) contention that for people who have been habituated to different ways of travelling, there is an inevitable ‘contestation over how to move, by what means and according to what norms’. Extensive attention, for instance, has been paid to the regulation of cycling in the city. Stigmatised as the incarnation of disorderliness and insecurity, both cycling and cyclists are easily victimised by a hegemonic automobile culture (Blickstein, 2010; Fincham, 2006).
The social construction and regulation of various mobile practices can be translated into the dialectics of mobility and immobility. Paradoxically, enhancement of mobility is always premised on producing certain forms of immobility. Movements of objects and social members do not take place automatically, but involve struggles with various constraints and are embedded in processes of control and management. Cultural norms, discursive regimes and institutional arrangements which favour mobilities of certain groups end up in the demobilisation of other social members. In most circumstances, it is one’s place in the social structure which conditions and constrains one’s opportunities of being mobile. As Massey (1994) and Adey (2010) have both contended, people from different strata of a hierarchical society possess fairly uneven levels of access to the right of mobility, making mobilities crucial sites whereby social inequalities are produced and reproduced.
Between mobilities and urban governance
Bearing in mind the need to focus on discourses, ideological meanings and knowledge, this article suggests that social power upholding regulatory practices in Guangzhou is not vested in bounded and pre-established political authority. It is interested in capturing the working of Chinese local state not in terms of absolute authoritarian domination but with specific focus on the discourses, constructed knowledge and geographical imaginations which justify regulatory practices and produce soft political power in managing an increasingly diversifying Chinese urban society. It is postulated that legitimacy of public policies originates, at least partly, from the state’s privileged position of speaking with more authority and producing, circulating or drawing from dominant cultural representations.
To some extent, this analytical perspective echoes the social sciences’ recent engagement with the Foucauldian theory of governmentality which focuses on the processes of problematisation and knowledge production in governmental practices (Foucault, 1991a; Miller and Rose, 2008; Rose, 1999). Governmentality is concerned with the ways in which a regime of truths is discursively constituted in order to justify rationales of state programmes and actions (Gordon, 1991). In this model of political power, the state and dominant groups play a disciplinary, as well as pedagogical, role in leading and shaping ‘decent’ or ‘appropriate’ conducts of individual social members in the name of achieving ‘good society’ and improving collective interests (Dean, 2010; Rose, 2000). To promote appropriate choices, desires, aspirations, wants and lifestyles, a regime of constructed knowledge needs to be established to define social ‘problems’ and configure specific government rationalities. It is always by framing such problems within shared languages and representational spaces that consensus can be reached that such problems do indeed exist and calls for state intervention can be made (Foucault, 1991b).
Meanwhile, if the politics of mobility implies establishing the discursive boundaries between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mobilities, it is often translated into concrete practices of street-level policing and regulation. Recent studies on the regulation of public space have forcefully analysed the ways in which public space is rendered the primary arena for the assertion of dominant definitions of social order and civility. With diverse practices of zoning, policing, disciplining and punishment, those who are deemed as uncivilised, disorderly and troublesome ‘others’ are frequently excluded from uses of public space (Bannister et al., 2006; Flusty, 2001; Mitchell, 2003). The increasingly stringent hand of state power on the management of everyday urban space echoes the rise of what is termed ‘revanchist urbanism’ in Western contexts (Smith, 1996). With such a reconfiguration of urban politics, practices of government are predicated on a plethora of institutional infrastructure serving an extended sphere of discipline or even the purification of urban spaces (MacLeod, 2011; MacLeod and Ward, 2009).
Finally, the production of particular discourses and knowledge enables street-level practices of regulatory power to be configured in different ways from the Fordist managerial state. On the one hand, although marginal social groups are nonetheless the primary victims of these regulatory regimes, rhetorics in urban policies can effectively sidestep any specific reference to questions of power, politics, injustice and rights. Instead, discourses underlying those policy orientations are often framed into purely technological lexicons (Blomley, 2011). By rhetorically defining public space as merely functional space designated for purposeful and utilitarian activities, the state disarticulates the regulation of public space from explicit references to the vocabularies of rights and citizenship (Blomley, 2007a, 2007b, 2010). On the other hand, in this paradigm of space governance, state power operates alongside new concerns and sensitivities. Urban policies are often oriented towards normative moral judgments of right/wrong, order/disorder, rather than structural factors and institutional failures which arguably have produced certain social groups’ collective inability to adopt more ‘decent’ or ‘respectable’ ways of living (Mooney, 2009). State police power in this form, as Blomley (2011) argues, does not target identifiable consequences of harmful behaviours but governs in the interest of more nebulous and abstract ideas such as public good, social order and efficiency. As Beckett and Herbert (2010) pointedly contend, such regimes of disciplining target on and illegalise specific behaviours or statuses of social members, rather than the actual consequences of disorder. They explicitly define differentiated citizenships, enforce zones of exclusion and enable the exercise of police power to monitor various aspects of mundane everyday life.
The motorcycle taxi as informal urban mobility
The motorcycle taxi refers to a motorcycle offering commodified transport service. Not subject to strict time schedules that public transport normally complies with, motorcycle taxis demonstrate a surprising level of flexibility and have become indispensable in the everyday mobile practices of ordinary urban inhabitants in Guangzhou. The flourishing of motorcycle taxis in Guangzhou started in the early 1990s and was closely associated with the popularity of motorcycles among Guangzhou locals. From the mid-1980s to early 1990s, alongside China’s rapid post-reform economic development, Guangzhou’s motorcycles gradually replaced human-powered bicycles. In 1990, approximately 200,000 motorcycles ran in Guangzhou’s urban streets and this number rose exponentially to 800,000 in 1998. They were used by households for everyday mobility as well as by motorcycle taxi drivers as a means for earning a living (Figure 1).
Motorcycle taxis awaiting passengers at the entrance of a metro station.
Motorcycles provided a much more flexible, rapid and efficient means of urban mobility and once they were seen as a proud symbol of Guangzhou’s nascent urban modernity. Yet, as Guangzhou’s urban economy has continued to boom during the past two decades, car-based urban mobility has become the new zeitgeist in the political and social elite’s imagination of modern life. Resultantly, the ownership of motorcycles has largely filtered down to less wealthy social groups. In the meantime, there has also been an intensifying anxiety over the contradiction between the ‘extreme flexibility’ of motorcycle mobility and the emerging vision of car-based traffic order. Motorcycles, eventually, have been ascribed with stereotypes of backwardness, disorderliness and insecurity. More remarkably, after over 15 years of being extolled as flexible, convenient and efficient, motorcycle mobility is now regarded as an ‘inefficient’ or even ‘wasteful’ use of public roads at odds with the dominant visions of car-based urban modernity.
In fact, it has already been observed that an automobility culture is now gaining an increasingly dominant status in Chinese cities. Seiler (2012) points out that the proliferation of automobility in China has aroused rich sensational resonances among the general public. The car has become not only a must-buy for middle class membership but a hallmark of the country’s entry into modernisation and the global economy. Indeed, as Sheller and Urry (2000) note, the car embodies a global form of mobility which subordinates alternative ways of being mobile. On the one hand, it is widely extolled as a source of freedom and individual agency (Sheller and Urry, 2000). On the other hand, and more importantly, the car has an expressive dimension that conveys modernisation, wealth and class prestige (Gartman, 2004). While in developed societies the 20th century witnessed the spread of car ownership down the class hierarchy, in developing countries the car still serves as a notable status symbol (Vasconcellos, 1997). Moreover, because the car is normatively associated with modernisation and progress, it feeds into national pride and identity (Edensor, 2004). Surely, the seemingly unconstrained mobility of cars is a mixed blessing, since threat of car accidents to life security constitutes a major risk of automobility (Featherstone, 2004). Paradoxically, the society is able to constantly restore its confidence in car safety, and the accident is viewed only as random aberration rather than an integral element of automobility (Featherstone, 2004). In fact, as Beckmann (2004) argues, risks of driving are denied when car accidents are transposed by experts as objects of investigation aiming at preventing their recurrence. In addition, the car itself is seen as a heavily equipped and highly protected shelter that promises safety, even if it means increased unsafeness for non-drivers who have to negotiate the interruptive effects of high-speed traffic (Sheller and Urry, 2000).
Apart from the rise of automobiles, Guangzhou municipal government’s ambitious initiatives to construct a modernised, technologically sophisticated public transport system also worked to devalue mobilities which the seemingly outdated motorcycle embodied. As Richardson and Jensen (2008) persuasively contend in their study of the Bangkok Sky Train, particular projects of public transport are legitimised and advanced by complex discourses, imaginaries and visions. This entails the state presupposing and imagining idealised types of urban citizens who are willing to inhabit ‘appropriate’ and state-sanctioned systems of mobilities to be designed and built for them. The Ninth Five-Year Plan of Economic and Social Development of Guangzhou, published in 1996, made an explicit appeal for large-scale construction of public transport facilities and elimination of ‘less efficient’ means of private transport. As one local planning official suggested, the planning philosophy of late 1990s Guangzhou was heavily influenced by theories imported from the West (interview, December 2011). It acclaimed the cost efficiency and environmental friendliness of public transport, yet used these laudable qualities to structure hegemonic discourses for excluding denigrated mobilities. It is thus not surprising that the outlawing of motorcycles corresponded with a milestone event in the city’s transport development, namely the opening of its first metro line in 1997.
As a result of the public-transport-cum-private-car urban future envisaged by the local political elites and technocrats, the motorcycle was problematised as the primary object of state regulation. As early as 1991, the municipal government started to restrict the number of licenses issued every month to motorcycles. In 1998, the local Urban Transport Administration stopped licensing new motorcycles, and in 2003 it was further prescribed that any motorcycle license was valid for only 10 years since its issuance. In 2001, the local government of Guangzhou implemented a municipal by-law which prohibited all motorcycles from entering two major blocks and two traffic arteries in the urban centre. While the aforementioned measures contributed to the reduction of the presence of motorcycles, the use of motorcycles to conduct street robberies further added to the contestation and anxiety over motorcycle mobility. Under the pressing issues of transport efficiency and street security, the municipal government finally decided to cleanse the city’s streets of the unruly motorcycle. This decision was publicised as a government ordinance in 2004. To alleviate its impacts upon those who had been habituated to motorcycle travelling, the same ordinance stated that the outlawing would be implemented by following two steps: since 2004 motorcycles had been prohibited to use 24 major urban traffic arteries, and eventually in 2007 the use of motorcycles in the urban centre was utterly outlawed.
Moreover, after 2004 many motorcycle riders – in particular motorcycle taxi drivers – began to use, as substitutes of conventional motorcycles, what were called electric motorcycles, a design of motor-vehicles upgraded from human-powered bicycles but propelled by electronic motors. However, in 2006 the municipal government of Guangzhou also outlawed the use of electrically-driven motorcycles in the entire metropolitan area of Guangzhou for the same reasons as outlawing motorcycles propelled by fossil fuel. In this article, the term of motorcycle taxi refers to a taxi service provided by both types of vehicles.
The regulation of motorcycle taxis is a direct consequence of the outlawing of motorcycle mobility. Interestingly, the motorcycle taxi as a form of business was never approved or licensed by the local state of Guangzhou. Ever since its invention, the motorcycle taxi has been an informal urban economy which appropriates motorcycle mobility to meet the demands for flexible transport service. According to the Rules on Traffic and Transport of the People’s Republic of China, any commodified transport service not licensed by a county or municipal government can be seen as illegal and subject to a fine. But due to the important role that motorcycle taxis played in facilitating daily urban mobilities and reducing the pressure on state-run public transport, the local state of Guangzhou initially adopted a quite tolerant stance towards them. It is only with the outlawing of motorcycles altogether that the motorcycle taxi became a primary object of state intervention.
Due to the illegalisation of motorcycle mobility, the use of motorcycles by ordinary households for individual mobility has been almost completely eradicated. But motorcycle taxis have persisted even in face of draconian police regulation. Nowadays, motorcycle taxis in Guangzhou are operated almost exclusively by rural-to-urban migrants struggling for economic survival in this rapidly modernising metropolitan city. As the local labour market provides relatively fewer and lower-paid employment opportunities for those migrants who are generally less educated or skilled, the motorcycle taxi service seems to be a relatively accessible way to sustain a livelihood in the city. In the meantime, however, this motorcycle-based informal economy has not only inherited the stigmatising representations of motorcycles as a whole, but also catalysed new narratives constructed to more concretely capture its illegal status and the disorderliness of migrant others who operated it, against backdrops of a totalising rhetoric of modernity and the punitive practices of the municipal police power.
Methods
This research is based on detailed examinations of the narratives and discourses related to the outlawing of motorcycle mobility and the practices employed in the street-level regulation of motorcycle taxis. Three research questions are engaged with in this article: 1) what are the rationales and discourses constructed to justify the regulation of motorcycle mobility?; 2) how are dominant understandings of motorcycles translated into the street-level exercise of disciplinary power?; and 3) how does this regulatory regime mirror the construction of government rationalities and police mentalities?
To answer these questions, I have reviewed all the articles and editorials related to motorcycle mobility in three major local newspapers, namely Yangcheng Evening News, Nanfang Daily and Guangzhou Daily, from 2002 to 2006, the period immediately before the use of motorcycles was comprehensively outlawed in the urban centre. Given that major newspapers in China are under direct state sponsorship, they are expected to act as the key sites whereby dominant discourses produced by social and political elites are played out. All three newspapers wield remarkable local impacts. Guangzhou Daily is sponsored directly by the Guangzhou Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It has continuously enjoyed the largest circulation among all newspapers distributed in the city, and its readership covers people from all walks of life. The circulation of Yangcheng Evening News follows immediately. Nanfang Daily is a widely circulated newspaper whose readership consists mainly of government officials, business people and professionals. It is under the direct sponsorship of the CCP’s Provincial Committee of Guangdong Province, of which Guangzhou is the capital city. 1
I have also collected publicised government documents, and applied via official channels for relevant information on the government rationalities justifying the regulation of motorcycles. It resulted in three Responses to the Requests of Government Information from the Police Department of Guangzhou (hereafter Responses 1, 2 and 3). As will be examined later, the accounts appearing in local newspapers and government documents often appear to be selective, narrowly-focused, exaggerated, ungrounded and/or removed from urban inhabitants’ everyday experiences. But, as I have argued earlier, it is precisely through these diverse configurations of representations that we can glimpse how social power is constituted through the production of knowledge.
Meanwhile, 27 in-depth interviews in total have been conducted with motorcycle taxi drivers (n = 16) and local police officers and government officials (n = 11), especially those in Guangzhou Police Department of Traffic, a police organisation which specialises in traffic management. Interview data are expected to further contribute to a concrete understanding of the various representational and discursive spaces underlying the construction of motorcycle mobility and motorcycle taxis, as well as the practices of street-level regulatory techniques.
Representing motorcycle mobility: Stigmatisation and knowledge production
This section engages with the ways in which motorcycle mobility as a whole has been represented and rendered ‘problematic’ in dominant state and social discourses. It examines how images of urban disorder and insecurity emerged out of mobile subjects and objects which formed the basis on which the regulation of motorcycle taxis can be further discussed. This section suggests that motorcycle mobility matters not as a given fact, but a social construction rendered intelligible by discourses (Cresswell, 2006). Intersecting representations constitute a regime of knowledge which is claimed by the dominant social strata to capture the irrefutable ‘nature’ of motorcycle mobility. Relying upon a highly moralised dichotomy between appropriate and undesirable mobilities, the state of Guangzhou claims for itself an ostensibly impeachable position of defending the collective welfare of the society (Dean, 2010).
The representations of motorcycle mobility explained explicitly why the maximisation of more ‘respectable’ and ‘ordered’ mobilities depended on the mooring of motorcycles. They created an ‘ambient power’ (Allen, 2006) which defined the normative codes of mobile practices on the urban streets. Hegemonic discourses rely on a set of technologies of governmentality (Miller and Rose, 2008) – including media reportage, statistics and social surveys – to frame constructed problems into scientific rationalities and concrete social ‘realities’. In Response 1, the Police Department of Guangzhou explicitly gives three reasons justifying the regulation of motorcycles, namely the high frequency of traffic accidents involving motorcycles; the disturbance of motorcycles to street order and traffic efficiency; and the connection between the use of motorcycles and street robberies. These three reasons also appeared in a number of government notices and newspaper articles which were intended to communicate to the general public the rationales for governmental actions. Therefore, this section frames its discussions of dominant social and state discourses in accordance with these three themes.
Problematising street insecurity
The first problem associated with motorcycles which was rendered visible concerns the issue of insecurity. Through discursively configuring the problem of street insecurity, a naturalised connection was built up between motorcycle mobility and accidents, injuries and even deaths. These representations portrayed motorcycle mobility as a major threat to bodily security and constructed the taken-for-granted ‘truth’ that motorcycles were necessarily associated with higher probabilities of traffic accidents. Motorcycles, as a result, were continuously referred to as ‘street killers’ which could not guarantee proper administration of wellbeing of life in an increasingly complex system of traffic: According to Guangzhou’s Department of Traffic Police, since 2000 till now those who were killed by motorcycle accidents account for approximately 40–50% of all deaths in traffic accidents. From 2000 to 2003, a total of 3298 people were killed in motorcycle accidents, about 2–3 deaths every day. Therefore the motorcycle is now dubbed as the ‘biggest killer on streets’. There is also a joke amongst Guangzhou locals that ‘the first generation motorcycle riders are all dead now’.
One article appearing in Yangcheng Evening News adopted the same rhetoric of the ‘biggest killer on the streets’ in an attempt to attest the rationalities underlying the outlawing of motorcycles: The motorcycle has already become Guangzhou’s ‘no.1 killer on streets’. During the first half of 2003, there were a total of 3044 motorcycle accidents in Guangzhou, with 363 deaths. Those who were killed in motorcycle accidents accounted for 43.61% of all deaths in traffic accidents.
As we can see from these two quotes, statistics played a central role in rendering intelligible the threat to bodily security that motorcycles could pose. This served as the key technique of discursive government which grounded the programmes of regulation into claimed scientific rationalities. From 2002 to 2006, such statistics abounded in all three newspapers.
Interestingly, such statistics also led to an eye-catching conclusion that if the so-called Accident Probability Index for cars was defaulted as 1, it would be as high as 9 for motorcycles – an argument crafted by a prestigious Chinese transport scientist which was even cited in several government documents (Yangcheng Evening News, 18 December 2006). At the same time, however, we may be surprised at how vaguely the notion of ‘motorcycle accident’ was defined in those number-based narratives. In fact, all three newspapers tended to define motorcycle accidents broadly as referring to all traffic accidents involving the presence of a motorcycle. What was neglected was a nuanced examination of the distribution of responsibility in any given accident. Ironically, both the newspaper and police staff that I interviewed acknowledged that motorcycles were not responsible for all of those accidents. However, rather than looking more closely at the exact roles that motorcycles played and the responsibilities they bore in specific accidents, newspaper representations instead highlighted the vulnerability of motorcycles, or motorcycle riders more precisely, in all accidents involving motorcycles. The seemingly ironic association between the car and safety (rather than unsafeness, see Beckmann, 2004) was reproduced and played out here. Motorcycle riders were portrayed as more vulnerable to injury or death in clashes with vehicles built with stronger physical structures such as cars and trucks. Such representations also scrutinised closely the assumed ‘under-controllability’ of motorcycles due to their smaller weight, mechanical uncertainty and lack of technological sophistication. Anecdote-style stories flourished, depicting how motorcycles suddenly lost balance or control of direction and how unexpected clashes with steel-and-concrete road infrastructures could lead to deaths or serious injuries. One intriguing media account conveyed vividly the tropes of vulnerability and under-controllability: One young motorcycle rider drove past a road, but his motorcycle suddenly began to falter and eventually fell down. The young man was very confused. Mrs Hu, who lived nearby, came to check that road. She found that because of the road repair work recently completed, part of the road surface was about 2cm higher than the rest. Such a small blemish in road conditions could be handled easily by four-wheeled vehicles, without even being noticed. But for motorcycles, it could mean threat to security.
In a similar vein, the police officers tended to describe street collisions involving motorcycles as ‘clashes between flesh and steel’: Clashes between cars are less likely to result in death, but clashes involving motorcycles can easily cause death. You know, in a car your fleshy body is protected by a strong steel structure; but with a motorcycle, the body is exposed and subject to direct collisions with physically more powerfully structures such as cars. It can be proved very dangerous for motorcycle riders.
Such accounts of vulnerability went hand in hand with representations of the unruliness of motorcycle drivers. These representations highlighted how motorcycle riders lacked compliance with traffic codes, and how unruly mobilities of motorcycles increased the possibility of traffic accidents. Motorcycle drivers were frequently portrayed as those who sabotaged the normative ordering of urban traffic by driving faster than they should, driving the opposite direction in a given traffic lane, competing with cars for lanes or carrying too many passengers. These transgressive acts brought about unexpected and uncontrolled street encounters that disrupted the rational order of uninterrupted flow, and were believed to lead naturally to accidents.
While these accounts might speak to certain realities, they nonetheless neglected the complex, sometimes irrational ways in which traffic rules could be appropriated and accommodated in micro-level practices and how not-so-friendly traffic environments might constrain mobile objects’ or subjects’ ability to abide by established codes and rules. More importantly, these accounts also served to stigmatise motorcycle drivers as an essentially chaotic and unruly mobile social group to be excluded from secured urban spaces. In the interviewed police officers’ accounts, the Chinese word of suzhi (literally meaning ‘quality’) is frequently elicited. To them, it was those motorcycle drivers’ lack of personal qualities which had contributed to their intrinsic inability to move with order and safety: Normally those driving a motorcycle lacked a high level of suzhi. After all they usually belonged to those less-than-wealthy social groups and many of them were under-educated. Compared to those who drove a car, they seemed to be much more unruly. Most of them did not have a clear sense of traffic rules. For example, some of them did not even know it was illegal to drive the opposite direction in a particular traffic lane.
Visioning modern and efficient urban streets
Representations of motorcycles also relate to the perceived contradiction between motorcycle mobility and the local state’s aspiration for making Guangzhou a desirable place for global flows of capital and resources. Motorcycle mobility is portrayed as incompatible with the modern values of order, controllability and efficiency. One argument that was widely circulated among local media was that according to certain scientific research (source unknown), the amount of motorcycles in a particular city correlated negatively to the city’s level of modernisation (Yangcheng Evening News, 15 January 2004). This argument was unsettling not only because merely 10 years earlier the motorcycle was considered exactly the symbol of urban modernity by the people of Guangzhou, but also because it attempted to build up a scientific logic that could quantitatively measure the relationship between motorcycle mobility and the nebulous notion of ‘modernity’. Although this argument was subsequently criticised as both simplistic and scientifically unsound, it nonetheless served as the basis on which motorcycle mobility was re-imagined and reconstructed in relation to the hegemonic notions of progress and modernity.
In these narratives, the unruly and transgressive mobility of motorcycles not only created threat to bodily security, but also fundamentally jeopardised the expected order and efficiency of public roads. It resulted in disorderly and chaotic use of urban spaces, and profoundly impaired the ability of other social members to enjoy uninterrupted flows. A plethora of media discourses blamed motorcycles for Guangzhou’s notoriety for chaotic traffic conditions: [Mr Zhang:] It was only after I began to drive cars that I found how annoying motorcycles were. Someone would argue that motorcycles are fast and convenient. But this is at the expense of the convenience of others, and made possible by violating traffic rules. Now some lanes have been designated specifically for motorcycles, but how many motorcycle riders would conform to this arrangement?
Here, mobility in public roads was unproblematically understood as a functional resource to be distributed rationally, rather than a crucial arena whereby citizenship and the right to the city could be enacted. In contrast to the flexibility of car travel which was viewed as controllable due to the socially and technologically mediated car-driver hybrid (Beckmann, 2004), the flexibility of motorcycle movements contradicted the entrenched notion of ordered urban traffic: Motorcycles were constantly violating the traffic rules, which seriously disrupted the normal order of urban traffic. Travelling in motorcycles was continuously chaotic and transgressions of traffic rules, such as driving unlicensed motorcycles, driving the opposite direction and driving in the small interstice between cars were very common. It not only jeopardised the order of traffic, but also reduced the efficiency of the use of public roads. (Response 1, Guangzhou police department, 25 April 2012)
For this reason, the motorcycle was frequently portrayed as an ‘out-of-date’ means of urban transport which should naturally die out in the linear process of social development and progress. It was claimed that the role which motorcycles played in facilitating everyday mobilities could be more efficiently fulfilled by more ‘respectable’ ways of urban mobility such as public buses, the newly constructed metro system and more importantly private cars. A couple of photos featured the supposed ‘colonisation’ of streets by motorcycles prior to the outlawing (Figure 2). Soon after motorcycles were partly outlawed in 2004, several newspaper representations featured how major traffic arteries had been ‘cleaned up’ and restored rational and uninterrupted flows of cars (Figure 3). The municipal government of Guangzhou also claimed, on various occasions, that after the outlawing of motorcycles, the average speed for cars in main urban arteries had been increased by at least 5–10 kilometres per hour (Guangzhou Daily, 28 October 2006).
Photos portraying the colonisation of streets by motorcycles.
Newspaper representation of Dongfeng Road before (right) and after (left) the outlawing of motorcycles.
Still, there was another and even more disturbing discourse which called for motorcycles to ‘give back the roads to cars’. In this discursive formulation, motorcycle drivers were re-imagined as the urban others who had usurped urban spaces from the more decent and respectable private car owners. In a 2003 news article, the then Mayor of Guangzhou explicitly confirmed that the outlawing of motorcycles would serve specifically for ‘making more space’ for private cars: Guangzhou needs to ensure the uninterrupted flow of traffic on its roads and also optimise its networks of traffic. Securing smooth flows of traffic in all our major transport arteries is the key to avoiding traffic congestion. Therefore we must restrict the use of motorcycles to make more room for private cars by cleaning up motorcycles from the spaces of urban traffic.
From insecurity to criminality
The local society’s hostile attitudes towards motorcycles were also associated with the perceived connection between motorcycle mobility and street criminality. Since the late 1990s, motorcycles had been intensely used by street criminals in Guangzhou as a means to conduct robberies. In usual cases, the criminals would ride a motorcycle at high speed, approach a pedestrian from behind, and then unexpectedly grab the victim’s handbag, earrings, necklace or mobile phone. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, motorcycle-based street robberies contributed significantly to the perceived insecurity and chaos in the streets of Guangzhou. According to the local Police Department, in 2002 a total of 9668 motorcycle-based street robberies happened in Guangzhou, accounting for 52% of all robbery offences. The number and percentage in 2003 were respectively 10,210 and 47.2% (Response 1). For ordinary residents in Guangzhou, being a victim of a street robbery was a highly unsettling and disturbing psychological experience, since it was normally in the form of an unexpected, fleeting street collision so violently disrupting the established disposition of the body in relation to both the surrounding environment and the taken-for-granted street order: [Miss He:] At that moment, I could hear noises of a motorcycle getting closer from behind me. But the time was just too short for me to make any reaction. The motorcycle rider began to grab my handbag. I tried to grab it back, but the speed of the motorcycle was so high and my handbag was taken by those thugs anyway.
As a result, both motorcycles and motorcycle drivers were targeted by the state as the principal objects of street policing. The municipal government issued a public notice advising pedestrians to beware of five types of motorcycles on the streets, including motorcycles which stopped by a bank or shopping mall without switching off the motor; motorcycles which travelled slowly alongside the streets; motorcycles with two male riders; motorcycles with licenses not registered in Guangzhou or with a fake license; and motorcycles whose license numbers could not be properly read. Also, in 2006 the High Court of Guangdong Province revised the provincial criminal codes and defined any motorcycle-based robbery worth over 500 Chinese RMB a felony. Criminals involved in such robberies might be subject to the death sentence in extreme circumstances (for example in cases involving the death or serious injury of others).
Meanwhile, the Guangzhou police launched a series of campaigns against motorcycle-based street robberies. In the media representations of those campaigns, criminals on motorcycles were continuously portrayed as desperate street villains who brutally violated the bodily security and property rights of ordinary pedestrians. Their disobedience and nonconformity to the legal regime were also spotlighted, as news reports abounded which depicted in detail how those street criminals so desperately resisted police arrests and how those resistances resulted in the injury or even killing of police officers and ordinary people voluntarily assisting police arrests. The local police force, on the other hand, showed extremely high morale in battling with those criminals on motorcycles. Sensation-laden photographs appeared frequently depicting police officers’ heroic suppression of motorcycle-based robberies and street criminals (Figure 4). Street encounters between the police and criminals were viewed as key sites in which the police force reasserted the normative police spirit of exerting heroic power to suppress dangerous and threatening elements in society. Local newspapers also featured several stories of ordinary urban residents who voluntarily united and fought valiantly against motorcycle-based crimes. In these representations, street criminals were re-imagined not only as a hostile force against state power, but also as common enemies to the respectable part of the general public.
Newspaper representations of the monitoring and suppression of motorcycle-based robberies.
It is certainly not the aim of this article to justify robbery on the streets or to criticise the local society’s attempts to suppress it. But at the same time we also need to note that to represent motorcycle robberies as immediate, de-contextualised street encounters is also to disarticulate them from the structural factors of social inequalities which contribute to such crimes. For example, many newspaper representations emphasised the disproportionately large presence of rural-to-urban migrants in perpetrating street crimes, but ignored how discriminatory institutional arrangements in urban China constrained the possibility for migrants to pursue a more decent livelihood (Solinger, 1999). Without making close scrutiny of the historical contingencies of crimes, such representational regimes ran the risk of universalising motorcycle drivers as an essentially dangerous and threatening social group.
Revanchism on the street: Regulating motorcycle taxis
The production of consent
As I have discussed in the theoretical section, to legitimise regulation with constructed knowledge and discourses can effectively conceal actually existing domination and social inequalities. As Foucault (1991a) has maintained, practices of governmentality can be camouflaged as merely the solutions to problems that threaten the collective welfare of the society, rather than the imposition of coercive, often biased political power. Hence, it was not surprising that the series of measures taken by the local state of Guangzhou, leading eventually towards the outlawing of motorcycles, was intended to give out the impression that the state had taken into account the interests of diverse groups as much as possible. This was reflected in the (ostensible) consultation of public opinions and the compensation schemes offered by the local government.
Before 2007, motorcycle taxis appeared frequently in all sorts of newspaper representations. Their perceived disorderliness and unruliness were strongly underlined in media depictions of insecurity and unruliness, if relatively less of street robberies. However, given that the discursive construction of motorcycle taxis is inextricably intertwined with the representations of motorcycle mobility as a whole, it seems bewildering to see how poorly motorcycle taxis were actually represented in processes of decision-making. Before the outlawing of motorcycles in 2007, the issue of the motorcycle taxi as a means to earning a living was only flimsily engaged in public debates and government documents. The reason for the significant absence of voices from motorcycle taxi drivers, presumably, was that the majority of them were rural-to-urban migrants, and therefore not taken into account in the policy-making undertaken by the local state.
Besides, the underrepresentation of motorcycle taxi drivers is also part and parcel of the local state’s attempt to produce popular consent to the outlawing of motorcycles through complex tactics of evidence-making and policy arrangements. For example, in a survey-based research published in 2004 by Guangzhou Public-Opinion Research Centre (GPORC), a state-sponsored survey institute, all research findings were carefully organised under an overarching conclusion that most Guangzhou citizens were supportive of the outlawing of motorcycles. Not only were its survey questions framed within ‘politically correct’ narratives of security and order which grassroots urban citizens could hardly resist, but curiously only 34% of the survey respondents were actually motorcycle users. Although it was reported that over 60% motorcycle users surveyed were against the outlawing of motorcycles, this dissident group accounted for less than 20% of all respondents, and thus this research finding was submerged under the overwhelming project of consensus-building. With specific reference to motorcycle taxis, the same research estimated that only 10% of all motorcycles in Guangzhou were used for earning a living, largely ignoring migrants who were not counted as potential respondents in the survey as well as their motorcycles which were commonly unlicensed.
To tackle the issue of breadwinning motorcycles, the municipal government launched a series of programmes aiming at the re-employment of motorcycle taxi drivers. Although these programmes did not explicitly exclude rural migrants, they proved attractive only to those motorcycle taxi drivers local to Guangzhou, who were offered a re-employment-cum-social-insurance compensation package. Migrants, on the other hand, were not entitled to the social insurance scheme while at the same time the re-employment opportunities provided incomes much lower than that from a motorcycle taxi service.
Nonetheless, by excluding migrant motorcycle taxi drivers from the process of decision-making, the municipal government was successful in building up a societal consensus that the individual losses resulting from the outlawing would be properly compensated. It also served to delineate the moral boundary between consent and dissent and to discursively construct as essentially deviant and incompliant the migrants who had no choice but to transgress the policy regime by continuing to provide a motorcycle taxi service.
This constructed dissident identity is coupled with new state-sanctioned discourses which contributed to the production of the otherness of motorcycle taxis in the ‘post-motorcycle Guangzhou’. First, due to the outlawing of motorcycles almost all motorcycle taxis in Guangzhou now are unlicensed and unregistered with the local government. This situation has suddenly rendered motorcycle taxis, as well their drivers, largely ‘unknown’ to the state apparatus. It has therefore raised a huge anxiety within the local police force over the state’s inability to ‘know’ the subjects/objects under its rule (Foucault, 1991a; Gordon, 1991). Second, both local media representations and police discourses now tend to focus on the relatively higher income that migrants can earn from a motorcycle taxi service than low-paid employments conventionally taken by migrants. In these representations, motorcycle taxi operators are portrayed as selfish social members who sacrifice the ‘collective interests’ of the city for the sake of personal gains. These narratives reaffirm the hegemonic notion that every social member should be positioned in a proper place of an ordered society and that ‘earning more than you should’ is necessarily related to the disruption of social norms. Third, although motorcycle taxi drivers were not often associated with street robberies before 2007, they are now increasingly considered to be potentially dangerous and threatening to street security. In part because of the stern regulatory hand of the local state, migrant motorcycle taxi drivers are now strengthening mutual social ties to tackle street-level police power. Interestingly, this strengthening of mutual connections is now interpreted by local police officers as the manifestation of motorcycle taxi drivers’ ‘gradual transformation’ from ‘individual business runners’ to ‘collective street gangs’ (Mr D, Police Supervisor, December 2011). Those newly constructed narratives and the abovementioned representations of motorcycle mobility in general have jointly shaped the local elite’s and the state’s stance towards motorcycle taxis, serving to justify the purification of urban streets by clearing away motorcycle taxis.
Street bureaucracy at work: Between governing techniques and police subjectivity
As Beckett and Herbert (2010) have argued, when social practices are judged morally according to the binaries of right/wrong, good/bad, the regime of discipline and punishment shifts its focus from consequences of specific activities to these activities per se (Blomley, 2011). In Guangzhou, this philosophy of governance has significantly expanded the scope of street-level exercise of state power, as the entire group of motorcycle taxi drivers is automatically criminalised.
Indeed, this resonates with a profound sense of confusion among many motorcycle drivers that I interviewed, for whom the association between criminalisation and harmful consequences is no longer taken for granted: We really don’t understand whether this policy makes sense according to national laws. What we do is simply using motorcycles to make some money, and no law prohibits making a living with one’s own hard work! I am actually very careful about road safety, and most of us neither steal or rob. So what harms have we caused? The police should devote more attention to those who actually committed crimes. (Interview, November 2011)
Since 2004, the Police Department of Guangzhou, especially its Traffic Police branch, has been dedicating a huge amount of energy to cleaning up motorcycles from urban streets. It is important to note that the local police’s regulation of motorcycle taxis is not out of a paranoid pursuit for domination and oppression, but grounded in a long-established tradition of police power to defend the ‘good’, the ‘ordered’ and the ‘respectable’ (Blomley, 2011). As Herbert (1996, 1997) has argued, the police are agents of state power who actively construct their own rules, spirits, beliefs and cultural meanings as they strive to enforce socio-spatial orders. Meanwhile, the police actions in Guangzhou also dovetail with China’s post-reform transformations. While the Chinese police in the Maoist era were primarily concerned with oppression of anti-revolutionaries and class enemies, their overriding mission in the reform era is to secure a stable and ordered social environment for achieving economic prosperity (Wong, 2002). The complicity between the police and developmentalism renders it seemingly inevitable that the priority of police actions is largely placed on ensuring the propertied classes to comfortably and safely enjoy the fruits of economic growth, while interests of the have-nots are often ignored (Wu and Sun, 2009).
In post-reform China, law enforcement and the maintenance of order result frequently in what is termed ‘campaign-style policing’ (Trevaskes, 2003), during which a considerable concentration of the police force and resources are used to crackdown on specific groups or activities. As Dutton and Lee (1993) have noted, during such police campaigns legal norms can be temporarily suspended and legal rights and citizenships are severely curtailed. Xu’s (2012, 2014) recent works indicate that the mentality of campaign-style policing clearly lurks behind the regulation of motorcycles in Guangzhou. On the one hand, the legal right of motorcycle drivers to use their own property is totally overlooked by the local state. On the other hand, regulation asserts the state’s legitimacy by making an unequivocal claim that state actions are being taken to contain disorders caused by rapid economic transition.
In fact, the regulation of motorcycles is enmeshed in a broader project of cracking down on street nuisances, including street robberies, unlicensed/untaxed transport services, the violation of traffic rules and road accidents. Numerous police campaigns have been launched to regulate not only gasoline- or electricity-propelled motorcycles, but also tricycles, motorised wheelchairs operated by disabled people and self-modified vehicles. 2 For the local police officers, the regulation of motorcycle taxis at the street level is an active process of subject formation, during which their use of territorial techniques of spatial management articulates with hegemonic visions of orderly urban spaces. During my interviews, not a single police officer related the regulation of motorcycle taxis to the deprivation of a marginal social group’s right to urban space. Although some police officers may be sympathetic with motorcycle taxi drivers’ socioeconomic marginality at a personal level, as members of a collective socio-political force they are uncompromisingly convinced that income gained ‘at the expense’ of normativised social order is morally despicable.
The police’s rhetoric, therefore, is discursively scaled down to an immediate street context, to a moral judgment of right and wrong, order and disorder. It is in such a discursive field that the street-level police morale is powerfully articulated. According to the local Police Department, in 2011 alone over 255,000 motorcycles used for taxi service were confiscated via street-level regulation (Response 3). But at the same time police officers also acknowledge frankly that it is beyond their capacity to utterly rid urban streets of motorcycle taxis – the sheer number of them and the convenience of buying new vehicles impose a huge cost of human resource upon the local Police Department. Hence, the symbolic dimension of police power is prioritised to the actual effects of street-level regulation – in other words, the symbolic presence of the state power in maintaining street order is considered essential in sustaining a police identity: We do not really expect that all the motorcycle taxis can be cleaned up. What we do is in fact all about deterrence. The pedagogical effect of regulation is more important than the number of motorcycles confiscated. If you do not regulate them, the people would think the government is doing nothing and the whole social order will be broken.
As a result, the local police force is keen on devising an exhaustive array of disciplinary tactics to be adopted at a street level. One motorcycle taxi driver describes their encounters with the police as an endless game of the cat and the rat: The logic of the game is quite simple: they try to locate us and confiscate our vehicles, and we try to avoid them. It is basically like between cats and rats. But the problem for us is, you can never be sure when and where the police officers may turn up. They always have new ways to maximise their ability to confiscate as many motorcycles as they can. You see, in China the government’s talent and creativity are all used to tackle helpless poor people. (Interview, November 2011)
At an earlier stage, the traffic police’s tactic of street-level regulation was quite simple. One police officer riding a police motorcycle would watch at a specific spot by the roadside and chase on sight any motorcycle taxi. But soon this watch-and-chase approach was criticised as too passive and potentially dangerous if it resulted in street racing between police officers and motorcycle taxis. Then the local police decided to set up observation-points at the intersections of main traffic arteries so that motorcycle taxis could be much easily caught when they slowed down for traffic lights. Subsequently, this tactic was considered as equally passive as motorcycle taxi drivers would simply turn around to drive in the opposition direction when they sighted police officers at certain intersections or crossroads. Eventually, the police realised that it was precisely the flexibility of motorcycles and their non-routinised ways of navigating mobilities that raised difficulties for regulation. Hence, the local police now prefer targeting upon the moments of the relative immobility for motorcycle taxis: the moments when motorcycles taxis are parked or awaiting potential passengers at certain ‘concentration points’ – metro station entrances, entrances to residential communities or pavements alongside busy urban roads. To act upon the moments of immobility requires joint actions of several local government departments, since the traffic police have no jurisdiction in regulating immobile vehicles parked at an urban public space. In normal cases, the local police would seek permission from other government departments and then a squad of police officers would unexpectedly raid those sites. Such actions significantly reduce the chance for motorcycle taxi drivers to escape police regulation, and result in considerable increase in the number of motorcycles confiscated during police campaigns.
Although this shift of focus from mobility to immobility has profoundly vitiated the motorcycle taxi owners’ ability to dodge police regulation, the local police are still less satisfied with the deterring effect which this tactic has achieved. The increased alertness of motorcycle taxi drivers has compromised the police’s ability to successfully and effectively locate and act upon a specific ‘concentration point’. As a result, police regulation of motorcycle taxis is now increasingly conducted by police staff in plain clothes rather than police uniforms. This tactic is aimed at reducing the possibility that police actions can be detected in advance by motorcycle taxi drivers. Besides, the police have adopted more flexible schedules of working time to create a 24-hour regulation system. The combination of a plain clothes police force and flexible timing has proved immensely effective in preventing motorcycle taxi drivers from recognising police officers or from evading them. One motorcycle taxi driver describes a deep sense of powerlessness while encountering police officers in plain clothes: If the police officers come in uniforms, we can still have some time to react before they come close to you. But now they are dressed just like everyone else. They approach you slowly and no one can tell that they are actually police officers. Sometimes, they even lie to you that they want to buy motorcycle taxi service. Then they suddenly hold your motorcycle firmly and identify themselves to you. What can you do then? When things turn out to be that situation, you cannot resist at all because in China you do not dare to attack a police officer. (Interview, November 2011)
Such unexpected encounters between the police and motorcycle taxi drivers can easily end up in violent conflicts. For those motorcycle drivers, a confiscated motorcycle normally means a loss equivalent to half a month’s income, and such a loss is more psychologically disturbing than economically damaging. For police officers, such face-to-face encounters with the deviant others are also emotionally charged experiences. Many police officers cannot help trespassing on the boundary between state rationalities and their personal dislike of migrant motorcycle drivers. The elevated police morale often leads to excessive use of violence in tackling disobedient motorcycle drivers. Indeed, narratives depicting the state’s ‘hatred’ towards street nuisances are frequently elicited during my interviews with motorcycle taxi drivers: I bet you [meaning the researcher] never really saw such a scene. It is not only violent. It is heartbreaking. I saw one police officer trying to confiscate a motorcycle yesterday, just a few hundred meters from here. The police officer pushed the motorcycle so hard to the ground and also beat the driver harshly, simply because the driver did not want to give away his vehicle. The driver was treated as if he had committed a felony like murder. It was so cruel and I really do not understand. Why do they hate us so much? We do nothing but try to make a living. (Interview, November 2011)
Conclusion
Mooney (1999) argues that the production of social relations in the city always involves the demarcation of ordered/disordered, respectable/unrespectable, good/bad. By examining the tensions inherent in these polar opposites, social groups and urban spaces are analysed as the products of exclusion, differentiation, conflicts and unequal power relations. Drawing from this contention, we may argue that it is exactly the attempt to envision and create order, civility and progressiveness which produces dominant understandings of disorder, incivility and backwardness. This article has attempted to demonstrate how the geographical imaginations of urban mobilities contribute to visions of public space. Urban streets are understood not as passive physical settings which mobile subjects/objects pass through, but the key sites in which the mobile practices are discursively constituted. If the right to the city, as Purcell (2008) conceptualises, should be understood in relation to the attempts of those in power to manipulate spatial relations and produce hegemonic visions of space, hegemonic representations of urban mobilities work exactly to justify the imposition of dominant social relations upon the production of public space.
To ground the regulation of public streets and mobile practices into the domain of social formation and power enables us to conceptualise the governing of both urban space and mobility as a historically contingent and dynamic process situated in specific cultural, social and political milieus. Such a perspective also allows us, to some extent, to depart from the understanding of the Chinese state in terms of a rigid dichotomisation between authoritarian domination and irresistible subordination. It emphasises, instead, the central role that Chinese local state plays in managing competing interests in a post-reform, increasingly complicated Chinese society in order to build social consensus and achieve imagined common good.
In Guangzhou, the wider implications of the regulation of motorcycles can be fathomed from two aspects. On the one hand, the exclusion of motorcycle mobility is above all a testimony of the restoration of class division and class dominance in post-reform China (Harvey, 2007). Since access to mobility enables better access to social resources (Kaufmann et al., 2004), biases towards private cars in urban planning practices further reinforced the advantaged positions of the upper and middle classes. On the other hand, did the regulation of motorcycles actually improve road safety, traffic efficiency and public security? The media accounts that I reviewed frequently underlined the contribution of the regulatory policy to the increase of road speed and reduction of accidents and street robberies. Although the accountability of these media narratives need not be doubted, the regulatory approach adopted in Guangzhou was bound to be ineffective in the long run, since it did not solve the internal contradictions of either the speed-oriented traffic culture or the crimes embedded in the widening social inequalities of post-reform China. As a matter of fact, in 2012 the number of criminal offences in Guangzhou soared to more than 119,100, even higher than in 2004 and 2005 when street robbery was at its height. 3 In the same year, the municipal government also had to initiate a series of measures to contain the number of private cars, since automobility, as Beckmann (2004) pointedly argues, had created its own immobilities in the form of accidents and traffic congestion.
By examining the social construction of regulated space, we can also glimpse the historical contingency of urban citizenships. Such a perspective sees citizenship as a site of struggles and political processes, rather than as a set of essential definitions and categorisations (Turner, 1993). In the case of motorcycle taxis, the exercise of disciplinary power opens up a lens through which we can understand how differentiated forms of citizenship are defined through the constitution of historically contingent discourses and micro-level exercise of police power. Here, it is necessary to engage again with Blomley’s (2007a, 2007b, 2010, 2011) insightful analyses of the ways in which citizenship is displaced by the rationales of regulatory power yet without making any reference to the rhetoric of right and citizenship at all. In Guangzhou, government discourses are constantly framed into technologically rational or morally correct vocabularies which scale down the politics of space to the immediate, ethically neutral and politically irrelevant street encounters.
Surely, the exercise of oppressive disciplinary power does not necessarily mean that either governmental officials or police officers are essentially ‘bad’ people. In contrast, governmental rationalities constitute a rather complex discursive and political space. Dominant discourses may well reflect the municipal government’s good intentions to care for bodily health, street security and efficient use of space. But they are ethically problematic in terms of the role that they played in producing an unequal structure of rights and power. Governmental rationalities or the police morale are never finished projects, but constantly renegotiated and reasserted in the ongoing production of social difference and otherness. This reveals the doxic dimension in governmental practices through which socially constructed notions, conceptions and ideas are taken for granted in micro-level social and political initiatives, and incorporated into the construction of either dominant or marginalised social identities (Bourdieu, 1977).
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank George CS Lin, Shenjing He and Ronan Paddison for their guidance through the review process. I am also indebted to the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.
Funding
Funding for this research comes from the University of Edinburgh, UK where it was undertaken as part of the author’s PhD research, and the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC Grants 41171125, 41130747).