Reshaping China’s Urban Citizenship: Street Vendors,Chengguan and Struggles over the Right to the City

Introduction

China’s urban citizenship is built upon an institution known as the hukou ¹ system (Solinger, 1999; Chan and Zhang, 1999; Goldman and Perry, 2002). In simple terms, the hukou assigns everyone a permanent place of registration and a status (agricultural or non-agricultural). One important consequence of hukou status is that it determines one’s level of, and access to, social benefits and entitlements. Urban hukous are associated with urban citizenship and provide access to high quality social benefits such as education and healthcare, along with full entitlements including retirement and unemployment insurance. In contrast, rural hukous include fewer entitlements and lower quality social benefits. This system was consolidated in the early Maoist period when almost 80 percent of the population lived in rural areas; hence they were assigned rural hukous. During this time, it became a powerful tool used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to limit population mobility and organize both production and redistribution in the centrally planned economy (Wang, 2005; Cheng and Selden, 1994).

In the post-Maoist period, economic reform and relaxed administrative controls have made it possible for peasants to leave the land and migrate to the cities. However, they live in the city as second-class citizens because the vast majority is denied urban hukous and associated citizenship rights. ² This system physically incorporates migrants into the cities and benefit from their labor without socially integrating them, shifting the cost of social reproduction back to the rural areas. ³ In most cases they cannot access public goods like education, housing and healthcare (Chan and Zhang, 1999). ⁴ In the cities, these migrants are also generally denied entitlements such as the basic minimum living allowance, unemployment insurance, and retirement pensions (Golley and Meng, 2011; Liu, 2007). Furthermore, without an urban hukou, migrants’ economic rights are limited. For example, some cities like Beijing restrict migrants to certain jobs and professions and it is difficult, if not impossible, for migrants to register their own business without partnering with locals (He, 2005). In sum, temporary residency status in the city does not translate into substantive urban citizenship for migrants (Wang, 2005; Alexander and Chan, 2004) and instead is associated with increased inequality, labor market segmentation, and discrimination (Huang, 2001; Guo and Iredale, 2004; Meng and Zhang, 2001).

Since migrants cannot gain urban citizenship and are denied access to associated benefits, many do not register in the city and effectively become ‘illegal’, lacking any right to be in the city. This large population of unregistered migrants is an important but overlooked, and possibly unintended, consequence of China’s hukou system (Huang, 2009). In many cases, both unregistered and registered migrants share a common fate of being denied access to economic and social benefits in the city. This forces them to live, work, and/or exist in informal spaces outside of the umbrella of the state. However, this article turns our attention from economic to political rights and explores one of the most notable differences between registered and unregistered migrants: the former have a right to be in the city while the latter do not; and the consequences of not being registered have transformed over time from a benefit to a burden.

For much of the reform period, which started in 1979, the process of becoming a registered migrant in the city was burdensome due to high costs and complicated documentation requirements. At the same time, registration offered few, if any, benefits. In fact, this study suggests unregistered migrants gained the unique benefit of falling off the state’s radar, which offered them a kind of Foucauldian freedom from the panoptic Communist Party. However, within the last decade the burdens of registration have attenuated while the benefits have increased. Registered migrants are now granted a limited set of rights in the cities while unregistered migrants lack status. This lack of status is an important source of political exclusion as they lack the right to have rights and it also prevents them from accessing new ‘legitimate’ legal avenues for asserting rights and claims-making. ⁵ The changing context has increased struggles for a right to the city, which occur between two groups with ambiguous positions in relation to the state: unregistered migrants who don’t have a right to be in the city, and local chengguan officials who are not police yet are charged with policing urban space and enforcing local regulations.

In the next section, I provide a broad overview of how theorizing and the conceptualization of citizenship has changed over time, and then focus on introducing the concept of urban citizenship and the closely linked idea of the ‘right to the city’. I also outline the development of urban citizenship in China under the hukou system, giving specific attention to the way migrants become spatially and socially segregated in the city. This is followed by a case study of unregistered migrants working as street vendors, and their interactions with the chengguan. It captures how unregistered migrants have increasingly contested the boundaries of their segregation as they demand a right to the city. The conclusion explores implications of this rising contention, offers insights into emerging spatial politics in China’s cities, and looks at how this case study in China informs our understanding of the underlying dynamic processes that produce spatial injustice and shape the resulting struggles over that space.

Urban Citizenship and the Right to the City

Marshall’s (1964) bedrock formulation of citizenship provides the basis for most of the prolific work that has expanded, challenged, and re-conceptualized notions of citizenship. Marshall conceived of citizenship as an expansion of membership rights in a nation, starting from the civil, moving to the political and eventually the social realms. His ideal types have been contextualized and historicized by scholars like Brubaker (1992), who shows how the development of nations, along with the dynamic interactions of different interests, shapes citizenship. As a result, notions of citizenship range from expansive assimilationist attitudes towards nationality to more restrictive and exclusive notions based on sanguinity. Habermas (1996), also building on Marshall’s work, moves in another direction by expanding the notion of citizenship as a legally ascribed membership to include a political and cultural meaning which empowers citizens to actively participate in the maintenance of the nation.

These studies that link citizenship with the concept of nation are compelling and insightful but not without criticism. As Sassen (2005: 285) suggests, ‘The national as container of social process and power is cracked’. In agreement, some scholars argued that citizenship is moving towards a post-national (Soysal, 1994) or global model (Held, 2000; Castells, 2011). In this framework, processes such as globalization and immigration are seen as weakening the nation-state and challenging the foundations of national citizenship, requiring it to be re-theorized on a broader level (Schiller et al., 1995; Castles and Davidson, 2000). For other scholars, conceptualization of citizenship needs to move in the opposite direction, within nations. Sub-national (denationalized) citizenship looks at citizenship forms that exist within national boundaries. For example, Kymlicka’s (1995) notion of multicultural citizenship, an alternative to assimilationist approaches to immigrants, suggests the need to recognize and protect different cultures within a nation. Isin and Wood (1999) argue that citizenship is both a set of practices (cultural, symbolic, and economic) and a bundle of rights and duties (civic, political and social) that can be understood on the local level. Another important example of sub-national citizenship is urban citizenship.

The concept of urban citizenship has gained prominence as cities have become salient sites for contesting rights. In part, this is because formal citizenship, which refers to membership, is often granted on the national level, while substantive citizenship, meaning access to political, civil, cultural and economic rights, is established on the local level (Holston and Appadurai, 1999; Purcell, 2002). Global cities and megacities are of particular importance because of the concentrations of wealth, and greater inequality leads to clashes over issues of citizenship and rights (Sassen, 2002; Harvey, 2008). The rise of urban citizenship also suggests that cities are where identity, politics and power interact to create access to political, civil, and economic rights (Desai and Sanyal, 2012).

Urban citizenship is strongly linked to the concept of a ‘right to the city’ which is particularly important in developing countries where rapid rates of urbanization are spatially reorganizing people and changing social relations. As a result, the majority of the world’s population is located in ‘urban peripheries in conditions of illegal and irregular residence, around urban centers that benefit from their services and their poverty’ (Holston, 2011: 336). These people are taking up struggles for the right to be in the city, to exist, to become part of the city and have a secured place in this space. Harvey (2008) argues that this right is collective, not individualistic, as his often quoted statement suggests:

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. (2008: 23)

Holston (2011) emphasizes the political aspects of the right to the city and its connection to urban citizenship. He argues that people shift from a framework of ‘declaring needs’ to a framework of demanding those needs as rights, or shift from a need-based to a right-based discourse:

Yet this new urbanism also generates a characteristic response: precisely in these urban peripheries, residents come to make right-claims for their needs on the basis of their dwelling there. That is, residents come to understand their basic needs in terms of their inhabiting the city, suffering it, building their daily lives in it, and making its cityscape, history, and politics. The many meanings of this making often coalesce into a sense that they have a right to the city –in effect, a right to what they have made. (Holston, 2011: 336)

Sassen (2002) also emphasizes the political by pointing to the fact that local citizenship gives rise to new practices, identities and claims-making:

These citizenship practices have to do with the production of ‘presence’ by those without power and a politics that claims rights to the city. Through these practices new forms of citizenship are taking shape, with the city as a key site for this type of political work, and, indeed, itself partly shaped through these dynamics. (2002: 285)

The origins and development of both urban citizenship and the right to the city make them particularly useful concepts when trying to understand how citizenship in China is being reshaped in the post-Maoist period. Urban citizenship is salient given that the hukou system links one’s access to benefits and entitlements to locality rather than nationality. Furthermore, hukou regulations themselves have become decentralized and localized (Zhang and Wang, 2010; Zhang, 2012), increasing the importance of cities as sites for negotiating citizenship and associated rights. The ‘right to the city’ is an equally useful concept when thinking about migrants and citizenship in China because it captures the contradictory reality facing most migrants in China’s cities. Finally, it helps us refocus on the political, not just economic, ramification of citizenship as shaped by the hukou system.

Urban Citizenship in China under the Hukou System

China doesn’t easily fit the theoretical model of citizenship that has developed based on Western liberal democracies. One major difference is that citizenship in China doesn’t provide, or even strive to provide, equal entitlements to all participants. Another important difference is that in China formal membership does not necessarily lead to substantive citizenship, meaning just because someone is granted the right to be in the city doesn’t mean that this right is associated with social entitlements (Zhang, 2002; Liu, 2007). Finally, contrary to some theoretical predictions, development of the market in China has not led to increased rights, expanded citizenship, or democracy (Goldman and Perry, 2002; Solinger, 1999).

The incompatibility of this theoretical model with empirical reality in China forces us to explore alternative frameworks and concepts to understand citizenship in this context. Accordingly, some scholars have turned towards the concept of urban citizenship, which emerges out of work that challenges Western-centric frameworks and confronts the impact of neo-liberalism on national citizenship (Purcell, 2003; Smith and Guarnizo, 2009). The emerging model of urban citizenship in China is characterized by spatial, economic and social segregation of urban natives and migrants (Zhang, 2002; Gua and Shen, 2003; Zhang and Wang, 2010). Migrants represent between 15 and 17 percent of the total Chinese population (Chan, 2010), and in large cities such as Shanghai or Beijing they account for about a third of the urban population. Despite their prevalence and importance in China’s large metropolises, migrants are spatially, culturally and socially segregated.

One might wonder how cities full of Chinese people can be segregated, or how people know who is a migrant and who is a local. A concept known as ‘place-based ethnicity’ elucidates how this seemingly homogeneous population constructs and maintains strong solidarities and divisions (Honig, 1992). Place-based ethnicity is based on locale and binds people together through shared cultural, linguistic, historical and sometimes social identity. In China, place-based ethnicity is salient, and as a result, locals can identify migrants by their body language, their dress, mannerisms and the way they talk. It takes on a biological essentialism similar to the concept of race in the United States or nationality in parts of Europe. Migrants are seen as culturally inferior, dirty (zang), uncivilized (meiyou wenhua), stupid (sha), and lacking in proper language (shuohua cao/tuhua). These traits are associated with the idea that they are lesser humans – they are often referred to as having ‘low human quality’ (suzhidi), which explains why they are more likely to be manual workers (dagong) and criminals (zuifan). While locals look down upon these ‘outsiders’, their lives in large cities have become highly dependent upon migrants (Zhang, 2001). Migrants are nannies taking care of children, selling fresh fruit and vegetables in neighborhoods across the cities, building new housing and sweeping streets. They are also servers, cooks, cleaners and porters and drivers, builders, guards and repairmen. They help make the city function as they provide massive amounts of cheap labor necessary to build these cities and to subsidize urban life. In sum, like in other countries, despite their social and spatial segregation, urban centers benefit from the services and poverty of these migrants.

In many ways, the spatial, economic and social segregation of registered and unregistered migrants is similar. For both groups, it is shaped by the hukou system, which denies all migrants urban citizenship and limits access to social entitlements and economic rights. The most notable examples are unequal access to housing, employment, and education. Registered and non-registered migrants are denied access to housing subsidies and to low-cost public housing in the cities. This forces many into informal and tenuous arrangements such as onsite dormitories, accommodations in the basements and back rooms of buildings where they work, high density rental housing in enclaves, and makeshift shelter in hidden public spaces such as under bridges, along waterways, and in alleyways. They also share commonalities in terms of employment segregation and wage differentials.

In some cities, like Shanghai and Beijing, the labor markets are formally segregated as migrants are prohibited from taking certain kinds of ‘good’ jobs such as civil servant positions (Meng and Zhang, 2001). This is reinforced by informal practices such as locals blocking access to certain professions like taxi drivers in Beijing, or employers only hiring migrants for jobs such as manufacturing and manual construction work. Finally, migrant children are effectively denied access to the urban education system. Unregistered migrants cannot send their children to school because they do not have proper documentation. Registered migrants who want to send their children to urban schools must supply significant documentation and pay higher tuition and sponsorship than locals (Liang and Chen, 2007). In most cases, costs are prohibitive, forcing migrants to choose between informal migrant schools in the cities, sending their children back to the countryside to stay with relatives and attend rural schools, or forgoing their children’s education to have them work instead. ⁶ All three pathways result in the segregation of migrant and local children.

Despite the similarities facing both registered and unregistered migrants, especially in terms of their access to economic resources and social/public goods, there are also significant differences. These important differences emerge when we shift our attention away from economic benefits of citizenship to look at political rights. In the next section, I present a case study of unregistered migrant street vendors to show how the consequences of their unregistered status have changed over time. It captures how political membership is increasingly salient and underlies intensifying contention between unregistered migrants and the local state.

Contesting the Boundaries of Segregation: A Right to Be in the City

This study is unique in its focus on unregistered migrants and use of longitudinal data to construct how the implications of their lack of status in the cities have changed over time. Street vending is one of the most common jobs for migrants, especially unregistered migrants. Also, street vendors occupy public space, which increases interactions with local government and citizens, central to reshaping urban citizenship practices.

The data used in this analysis come from field research that has been conducted over a period of nine years, beginning with a year-long visit in 2004–5 that was supplemented with follow-up visits in 2006, 2009, and 2012 ranging in length from one to five months. ⁷ The core of this analysis is a small set of longitudinal data about a group of street vendors that I have followed over the course of these nine years. The original group consists of nine vendors, all of whom are women participating in fruit or vegetable vending in Beijing. Those data are supplemented with 10 additional open-ended interviews with random vendors in Beijing (three), Guangzhou (three), and Wuhan (four). The data also include four interviews with local citizens (two in Beijing and two in Guangzhou) and local officials (again two in Beijing and two in Guangzhou). ⁸ Interviews with vendors focus on three topic areas: 1) background information about the vendor, 2) details of how the business is conducted, and 3) interactions with both customers and state local enforcement agencies. Interviews with local citizens and local state officials/enforcement officers cover a range of topics; the data used in this article come from questions that focus on 1) understanding their interactions with vendors and 2) their opinions and ideas about vendors and street regulations. ⁹

The case study and data are presented in three sections. The first section focuses on providing some background and demographic information on street vendors and the main enforcement agency officers who regulate street activity, known as the chengguan. The second section looks at how public spaces and streets are regulated and socially segregated. Finally, the third section documents changes in the spatial boundaries of street vending, and in the interactions between the migrants and the chengguan.

Populating the Streets: Street Vendors and the Chengguan

China’s massive migration has fueled urbanization with more than half of the population now living in urban areas and increasingly working in the tertiary sector. Another important trend has been the rise of informal work. By 2009, 60 percent of all urban employment in China was informal, meaning it is performed outside the purview of the state, and migrants fill a majority of these jobs (Huang, 2009). ¹⁰ Informal urban work is diverse but street vendors are one of the most common occupations, and since the economic opening in 1978, they have become a ubiquitous and integral part of China’s urban streetscapes (Dutton, 1998; Solinger, 1999; Zhang, 2001). ¹¹

Street vendors are a diverse group. ¹² Many, if not most, are migrants, especially unregistered migrants. There are some street vendors who are local citizens who are unemployed or laid-off workers, and there are also some college students. ¹³ One notable difference among these groups is that in many places urban citizens can get licenses to sell on the street while migrants cannot, making the very practice of street vending illegal for migrants. Migrant street vendors who sell goods are usually women, many of whom are older women. In contrast, street vendors who cook food and sell it are more likely to be men; the men cook and women assist. ¹⁴ While the work is gendered, street vending is often a family activity.

As the number of street vendors has grown so have the local entities responsible for regulating them. Many Chinese cities have established para-police called chengguan, also known as urban management officers to enforce local urban laws and regulations. ¹⁵ In 1997, Beijing was the first city to establish an urban management office with roughly 100 officers, which has since grown to over 6000 officers. Other cities have followed suit, and by 2005 around 308 cities had established chengguan forces (Human Rights Watch, 2012). Some cities, such as Shanghai, Guangzhou and Nanjing, also have City Appearance Administrations (shirong guanliju) which have a mandate and jurisdiction that overlap with the chengguan. ¹⁶ These offices are charged with enforcing a wide range of local ordinances and regulations which are sometime vague and vary across places. However, one of their primary activities is regulating the streets and public spaces, with a focus on street vending. Another important common characteristic of the chengguan is that they are local citizens. In many cases they are older men with local hukous (urban citizenship) who were laid-off or unemployed workers before being hired. ¹⁷ They are embedded in the communities, working out of the local community-based sub-district level offices known as jiedao.

Street vendors and the chengguan are not the only actors involved in the growing protests and contention over the streets and public spaces. Local citizens and other local officials such as the police or government administrators are a part of the debates and are often drawn into contentious activities, protests and collective actions. The next section explores how these social actors and their interactions have shaped social segregation and spatial politics in the city.

Regulating Space: Zero Tolerance, Tolerated Illegality and Contested Spaces

As in other places, there are significant spatial politics that order the street activity in China (Stillerman, 2006). In some spaces, chengguan and local authorities take a ‘let it be’ approach, creating spaces of tolerated illegality in which vendors can operate freely. In contrast, other spaces are off-limits – chengguan and local authorities have a ‘clear it away’ or ‘zero tolerance’ policy which keeps migrants and vending out. Finally, there are some spaces in-between, which are grey areas, increasingly contested and characterized by clashes between chengguan and migrants.

In spaces that have been established as ‘off-limits’ there is zero tolerance for activities like informal vending and they are heavily policed with regulations strictly enforced. These spaces include popular designated shopping districts such as the Wangfujing and Qianmen in Beijing, or Nanjinglu and Huaihailu in Shanghai. They also include entertainment areas characterized by large storefronts, pedestrian areas, and malls, all of which are generally zero tolerance for street vending. Sometimes, but not always, there are physical barriers that demarcate ‘zero tolerance’ zones, including turnstiles, gates, walls, stairs, chains, barrier landscaping, entranceways, and archways.

Generally speaking, most migrants accept the boundaries of social segregation in the city and avoid these areas. In part, this is because migrants are made to feel unwelcomed when they venture into highly regulated spaces. ¹⁸ For example, Xiao Mei, a 22-year-old unregistered migrant, explains that she window shops to see the new styles and then returns home and orders them online. Of course, the online version is much cheaper than what is in the stores, but she insists they are ‘exact replicas’. I asked her if she has been in the mall in a popular shopping district,

Another woman migrant concurs:

There are some shopping places that I feel comfortable and some that are uncomfortable. Sometimes I go into stores where I cannot afford to buy things but it gives me ideas (for style). I like to see what they have but when I want to buy something I go where I can afford to shop. (personal interview, 1 August 2009)

They talk about how they don’t belong in the stores and how the people in those spaces actively work to make them feel uncomfortable and out of place. These women continue to venture into spaces that make them feel uncomfortable or places where they ‘don’t belong’ because they are driven by aspirations to look or be ‘urban’ and attempt to mimic the trends and fashions set by the global middle-upper class citizens in the cities (Chang, 2008). However, this doesn’t apply across the board. Some migrants, especially unregistered migrants, don’t want to draw attention and instead prefer to blend in with their surroundings. As one unregistered migrant explained:

Unregistered migrants are aware of their lack of status, but it becomes less important when they are around other migrants and more important when they are in spaces that are ‘off-limits’. They understand the potential implications of traversing the boundaries and, as a result, they do a lot of self-policing.

In contrast, there are other spaces in the city where officials and enforcement officers adopt a ‘let it be’, attitude creating spaces of ‘tolerated illegality’ where illegal, but not necessarily criminal, activity is widespread and accepted practice. The best examples of this are migrant enclaves where vendors sometimes outnumber storefronts. Other such activities include growing gardens in public or shared green areas, setting up and operating businesses or housing units without proper permits and licenses, and littering or dumping garbage and waste. ²⁰ These activities not only happen in migrant enclaves but can also be found across cities in other unregulated or ‘let it be’ spaces such as alleyways, near transportation junctions, some public parks or squares and the outskirts of cities.

Finally, there are also spaces in-between, grey areas that have become contested space. Unregistered migrants, locals and city officials are increasingly clashing over who can occupy the space and how it can be used. As the next section shows, contested space is often at the boundaries of spaces of tolerated illegality, but these boundaries change over time, as do the interactions between migrants, locals and officials.

Struggles over the Right to a Livelihood: From Foucauldian Freedom to Exclusion

In 2004, I began to spend time with three specific groups of unregistered migrant women who are vegetable and fruit sellers vending in different locations in Beijing. One group sells near a subway stop on the ‘ring road’ that circles Beijing city center, another group does vending on a side street near a cluster of universities, and a third group is located right outside of a migrant enclave on the northwest edge of the city. I chose to spend time with them, in part, because they were located along my almost daily commute. However, as the analysis below will show, despite their different locations, the struggles and issues they face are similar. During a year-long stint in China, I was able to spend time with these women almost every week, sometimes every day. As the years passed, I have returned to China periodically and each time included a visit with them on my itinerary. Sometimes I visited one day for a few hours, and on other visits I stopped by for a few hours each day I was in town. The resulting longitudinal data captures changes in their attitudes and perspectives about their work in the city and changes in their interaction with the chengguan.

In 2004–5 these women did not see their lack of registration as a burden and, contrary to my expectations, they suggested there was a benefit to not being registered in the city. They didn’t have to check in with the local district office and pay the registration fees. They viewed these fees as a waste of money because they believed there was no benefit to being registered. They could evade family planning officials and they could, without bureaucratic interference, pick up and move their work to a different part of the city or a different city altogether. These ‘benefits’ of not registering in the city collectively represent a kind of ‘Foucauldian freedom’ from the panoptic state apparatus.

This Foucauldian freedom did not preclude all interactions with the state. Migrant vendors, because they operate in public spaces, still interacted with the chengguan who were charged with regulating the streets. For example, one group of migrants set up their vending stands on a side street near a few major universities. They set up their stands every day in the same spot according to an established pecking order. ²¹ The chengguan would come along on a fairly regular basis, usually once a week, to issue fines to all the vendors. At that time the average fine was 30 kuai (roughly $4) per vendor. One week the chengguan handed the migrants ‘pink slips’ documenting the infraction and the amount of the fine, and then the following week they came by and collected money without giving receipts – the latter constituted an under-the-table transaction. The women were not upset or angry about having to pay fines and bribes to the chengguan. They explained that it was just another cost of doing business in the city and saw the informal payments as ‘lunch money’ for the chengguan which supplemented their low salaries. When the chengguan ticketed the vendors it was a friendly and peaceful process. They arrived and the vegetable sellers didn’t run or hide nor were they angry. Instead, they handed over the money, joked with them and even offered them some free produce to bring back to their wives for dinner.

In contrast, four or five years later in 2009, the way these migrants felt about their unregistered status and their interactions with the chengguan had changed. They were still feeling the effects of a government initiated campaign that had been implemented to prepare the capital city for the Olympic games. This included ‘cleaning up’ the streets and clearing unsightly neighborhoods and people from the city which, for some of the migrants, brought up memories from the SARS crisis and resulting purges. The group of women who were vending near the university, many of them the same migrants who had been selling four or five years ago, continued paying fines as usual. However, under the campaign they were also forced to shut down their stalls on certain days; they complied. One difference was that they no longer framed these interactions as being another ‘cost of doing business in the city’, and instead they now complained about the chengguan ‘harassing and targeting migrants’, specifically them. However, they felt like vending was their best option given that they were unregistered and lacked connections. There were a host of reasons they gave as to why they couldn’t get registered, such as they needed formal housing, they were living in violation of the family planning laws, or they didn’t have some necessary document. They also expressed suspicion of the registration system. Finally, because they were unregistered migrants who were vending, they felt they had to suffer the bad treatment from the chengguang – there was no alternative.

The boundaries of tolerated illegality were also changing. The group of women migrants who were vending outside of an enclave on the outskirts of Beijing had not interacted very much with the chengguan in 2004–5, but by 2009 they were complaining that the chengguan had started doing regular patrols on their street, had increased sporadic raids of the enclave and were threatening demolition. Again, they felt as if they had little choice but to comply, given that they were unregistered migrants who were vending. However, they were also very angry. They complained about how it was unfair to be harassed by the chengguan given how far away they were from the city center and the Beijing Olympic venues. This was an enclave and ‘migrant area’ which should be left alone. They talked about how the migrants were being ‘chased like dogs’ in the narrow streets of the enclave and rounded up, taken to the local police office where they had to pay fines, suffer beatings, detainment and sometimes repatriation.

Most recently, in 2012, the boundaries of space had shifted again, as had the nature of the interactions between the chengguan and the migrants. The group of women who had been vending near a subway stop on the ‘ring road’ had been ‘cleared away’, as had a small enclave that was not too far away. About half of the eight migrant women who had been vending near the universities were different from the original cohort in 2004–5. The four women migrants who had been selling vegetables over the last nine years suggested that the spot was now ‘unstable’ and ‘unprofitable’ because of the ‘corrupt’ chengguan. One women vendor from Heilongjiang who had been there for five years was working to obtain a new spot for her stand in a migrant enclave that was further away from the universities where she had heard the chengguan were much less active. However, the majority of these women vendors were not interested in relocating their businesses or leaving the cities.

Another important change occurred in their attitudes; these women no longer adhered to the idea that they had no choice but to suffer the chengguan. They had become intent on developing and using strategies to push the chengguan out of ‘their’ space. In an effort to stop ‘corruption’, they now refused to pay fines without getting a receipt. In response, the chengguan sometimes moved on to other migrants, but sometimes they used violence, hitting the women, destroying their produce, and threatening to detain them. They would fight back with both verbal and sometimes physical responses. In most cases, they also pulled out their cell phones to visually record the incidents. One woman who had been vending by the university for about five years explained that arguing with the chengguan might be expensive and painful in the short run but it would save them a lot of money in the long run. They refused to pay bribes because they didn’t want to be ‘easy money’ for the chengguan. They suggested that paying the bribes would only keep them coming back ‘more frequently, and asking for more money’.

The women also began to ignore requests by the chengguan to stop selling or move their stand. They claimed their right to sell in that spot was de facto after having been there for years. One woman was suspicious of the chengguan, convinced that they were trying to gain control of the location and fill it with new vendors who would be willing to pay higher ‘fees’ for the prime spot and the chengguan turning a blind eye. The women also forcefully stated that they had a right to make a living in the city. They made claims of being ‘hard working’, distinguishing themselves from vagrants (mangliu), beggars (qigai) and criminals who steal for a living (zuiren and pianren). One woman who had been living in the city for many years said, ‘we are not demanding a hukou, we don’t care about the hukou, we want to make a living’ (personal interview, 2 July 2012). These small battles and daily struggles with the chengguan are increasingly punctuated with larger more explosive protests.

As the saliency of these struggles for a right to the cities, a right to the streets, and a right to a livelihood increase, more of these daily interactions between street vendors and the chengguan are evolving into larger protests or devolving into riots. I present three such events to illustrate a few key points. In September 2011, in Kunming city, Yunnan province, a female vendor with a baby had a tussle with the local chengguan. When the baby was hurt, an older male vendor stepped in to break up the fight. In turn, he was brutally beaten by seven or eight chengguan with steel pipes and clubs. When the chengguan tried to flee the scene, local witnesses smashed their vehicle windows and prevented them from leaving. In the meanwhile, roughly a hundred or so street vendors had congregated on the scene. They followed the chengguan to the local police office and demanded justice (Chen, 2011). Altercations between street vendors and the chengguan that include physical violence against migrants are common. It is also increasingly common to have people (both migrants and locals) get involved, either directly by trying to stop the violence, or indirectly, by capturing events on video or in photographs and posting them on the internet via social media sites.

In contrast, in other cases migrants plan and orchestrate protests. In Wuhan city, Hebei province, migrant street vendors turned to performance art to protest their treatment. This took the form of 10 men marching a ‘dead’ body through the streets to mourn the loss and condemn violence on the part of the chengguan. The protestors placed the body at the doorstep of the local chengguan office. Many members of the public didn’t realize that it was a protest action and mistakenly thought that they were carrying a real dead body. The angry response forced local officials to make a public statement during which they reminded people, including the press, that these migrants were ‘illegally occupying the streets’ and, despite warnings, they persisted in doing so (Global Times, 2013). These kinds of organized protests, as opposed to spontaneous protests, are growing in numbers and vary in size and form.

Finally, there are some cases of protest which have had such a widespread impact that they present the possibility that these struggles are tapping into broader elements of discontent which could have a more revolutionary potential. The most well known example is the case of a watermelon vendor, Deng, who many feared would become the Chinese equivalent of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who is credited with igniting the Jasmine Revolution. ²²

In July 2013, in Chenzhou, a city in the south-central province of Hunan, a peasant couple was selling their produce in the city when the chengguan arrived, fined them, and took some watermelons. Later in the day, they had a second interaction with the chengguan. This time there was a physical altercation that ended with the death of the husband and a severe injury to the wife. The chengguan immediately claimed that the famer had suddenly ‘dropped dead without provocation’. Onlookers filming the incident had their phones confiscated and smashed by the chengguan but some photos made it onto the internet. In response, in record numbers the general public expressed outrage on social media outlets such as weibo. ²³ Following the incident, thousands of people surrounded the dead body to prevent local law enforcement from taking it, fearing that they would dispose of it and other evidence of wrongdoing. Eventually, the police literally beat their way through the crowd to recover the body, which provided more fodder for the internet. Under pressure and the watchful public eye, they agreed to conduct an autopsy in the presence of the family. Anger continued even after the family was offered a large settlement from the government. ²⁴ Rather than the case fading into the background, as most do, two local officials in the chengguan office were dismissed and eventually four officers stood trial and were sent to jail. This incident is an example of how public anger and commentary can influence the outcome of events which, in this case, included holding the chengguan responsible for their actions.

All three examples show the different ways that interactions between the migrants and chengguan evolve, or sometimes devolve, into protest. They also reveal how these struggles, while between migrant vendors and the chengguan, include many other actors such as bystanders, other migrants, the general public and state officials. They show how the right to be in the city and the right to a livelihood, both political rights, are becoming increasingly salient and the struggles more contentious.

Conclusion: Political Rights and China’s Emerging Urban Citizenship Regime

China’s emerging urban citizenship and spatial politics are bounded by the hukou system and scholars have shown how, under this system, migrants become second-class citizens in the cities as they are denied access to most public goods and social entitlements. This article shifts our attention to struggles over political rights, specifically the right to be in the city and the right to a livelihood, showing how they are becoming increasingly salient and contentious. It focuses on unregistered migrants and shows how, despite their lack of formal urban citizenship or residency, they are increasingly making normative claims about their right to occupy the streets and to make a living which are the basis of increasing contentious clashes with public security officers (chengguan).

This analysis provides several reasons why migrant struggles over their rights to occupy the streets and to make a living in the cities are becoming salient and contentious. Most obviously, the numbers of both street vendors and chengguan have dramatically increased, which leads to more interaction between them. Second, migrants’ perspectives on both the chengguan and their situation in the cities have changed over time, making them willing, even intent, on struggling for their right to occupy the streets and make a living. Third, these migrants cannot get licenses as vendors, remaining easy targets of the chengguan. Finally, their lack of status in the city means that they cannot utilize established sanctioned claims-making avenues such as the courts, legal aid centers, NGOs, complaint lines, petitions, and visits to local officials. This shapes the form of their struggles, all of which are outside of sanctioned channels, including direct clashes with the chengguan, riots, performance protests, and organized street protests.

This study also points us towards the need for further research on the politics behind these clashes, including a deeper understanding of men who become chengguan and how we understand the complicated relationship between the state and the chengguan. The chengguan, if they are primarily laid-off state-owned enterprise workers and newly unemployed, represent an important group of disenfranchised workers. This raises questions about these clashes: are they clashes between two distinctly different groups of disenfranchised workers, between urban citizens and migrants, or between the state and migrants? If the chengguan represent a group that lost out in the reform era as socialist promises have been abandoned, how does this shape their actions and interactions with migrants? The chengguan are not police nor are they independent of the state, which raises important questions about how their mandate and priorities are shaped, and by whom.

These migrants in China are part of a growing global population living precarious lives in urban peripheries without citizenship and without legal or regular residency. They are increasingly important, yet invisible, but their existence challenges nation-based conceptions of citizenship. At the same time, their daily practices and routines become the basis of normative claims-making in their struggles for urban citizenship. It grounds the spatial aspects of their struggles; they informally occupy the streets as vendors and, over time, they claim the right to the streets and the right to a livelihood based on established past practice. This directly clashes with urban development that, driven by neo-liberal principles, shifts spatial boundaries as it remakes districts and neighborhoods, and attempts to relocate noncitizens into new spaces of invisibility.