Food, Culture & Society
An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research
ISSN: 1552-8014 (Print) 1751-7443 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rffc20
Moveable feasts: reflections on Shanghai’s street
food
Anna Greenspan
To cite this article: Anna Greenspan (2018) Moveable feasts: reflections on Shanghai’s street
food, Food, Culture & Society, 21:1, 75-88, DOI: 10.1080/15528014.2017.1398472
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2017.1398472
Published online: 21 Dec 2017.
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A. GREENSPAN
transformed. The barbecue stands and noodle stalls had been replaced by brand-name stores
and fast-food chains: Uniqlo, H&M, Subway, and McDonalds.
This paper aims to analyze the complex relationship between a regulated, formal commercial sector and a much more anarchic informal economy as it plays out in the making
of the twenty-first-century city. It does so by reflecting on the changing fate of Shanghai’s
street food. The “renovation” of Wujiang Lu is part of a wider trend that has been intensifying in Shanghai for much of the past two decades. Since I arrived in 2002 a plethora of
once vibrant street markets have disappeared: the flower market on Shanxi Lu has been
replaced by a concert hall; the fake goods and wet market on Xiangyang Lu is now the site
of a high-end mall in which stalls that once sold fake Gucci and Prada bags have given way
to branded stores selling the real luxury items. The antique vendors on Dongtai Lu have
recently been relocated and, on the block where they once gathered, the ground is being
prepared for what will be one of the tallest towers in Puxi. In its drive to position itself as a
city of the future, Shanghai has adopted a linear model of growth which views street food,
street markets, and street life as belonging to a past that must be overcome. Urban planners
and municipal officials have adopted a view of modern progress conceptualized, as DM
Bluestone puts it in his essay “Pushcart Evil,” “as a passage in which the ‘backwards’ chaos of
‘traditional’ urban markets gives way to the more ‘advanced,’ clean and well-ordered commercial sector made up of specialty shops, retail arcades, department stores and shopping
malls” (Bluestone, 70). What follows aims to challenge this view, maintaining, along with
others, that the informal is not simply a temporary phenomenon (Chen 2005; Neuwirth
2011; Roy 2009), but rather that the markets, life, and food of the street are a vital part of the
city’s future ambition. Shanghai’s importance as a model for twenty-first-century urbanism
rests not only on its high-speed trains and super-tall skyscrapers, but also, just as vitally, on
its BBQ vendors and baozi stands.
My analysis is informed by “Moveable Feasts” (http://www.sh-streetfood.com), a digital
humanities project aimed at researching Shanghai’s rich street-food heritage. “Moveable
Feasts” began with small-scale community discussions, initiated in conjunction with the
city’s first hacker space Xinchejian. These initial workshops then grew into an online platform. Beginning in 2015 the project formed the basis of a class I taught at NYU Shanghai
in which students (some local and some foreign) worked to map the city’s street food,
interview vendors, and research Shanghai’s street-food landscape. Over the course of two
years, Moveable Feasts has collected data on over 200 street-food stalls, interviewed dozens
of vendors, and conducted a variety of deep mapping experiments. Through this process we
have analyzed a host of issues such as place making, migration, and strategies of formalization3 that are impacting the shifting street-food landscape in Shanghai.
Contemporary Shanghai is hardly alone in subscribing to a conception of temporal
progress in which the informal, grey, or shadowy world of “traditional” markets is seen as
“underdeveloped” zones that will inevitably be absorbed by the bright and transparent light
of the modern economy. “The widely held view of those who work in and study urban economic development,” write Jamie Alderslade et al. in their report on the informal economy
for the Brookings Institute:
… is that the more “advanced” a city’s economy becomes, the more inevitable the shift of
economic activity from informal to formal spheres. Based on this assumption, “backward”
Third World cities will generate more informal economic activity than their more “advanced”
urban counterparts in more developed countries. (Alderslade, Talmadge, and Freeman 2006, 6)
FOOD, CULTURE & SOCIETY
77
These ideas, which consider development as incompatible with street peddlers, are rooted
in some of the most foundational theorizations of modern capitalism. Karl Marx, Max
Weber, and Joseph Schumpeter all maintained that the uncontrolled spontaneity of the
town market, shouk or village bazaar would, eventually, disappear. The Marxist idea of the
concentration of capital, the Weberian notion of the growing bureaucracy of the “iron cage,”
and the Schumpetarian conception of the routinization and bureaucratization of the entrepreneurial function, all maintain the belief that small, street-level businesses would, with
sufficient levels of economic growth and modern industrial development, be replaced by
the large, formal, and highly bureaucratic institutions of capitalism. These attitudes, as John
C. Cross and Marina Karides show, were widely shared throughout the twentieth century.
Victorian social reformers such as Booth lumped street vendors into the lowest class
of urban dwellers who could “render no useful service [and] … degrade everything they
touch” (Cross and Karides 2007, 21). The famous anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1963)
“lamented the cultural backwardness of the ‘Bazaar Economy’ (ibid.). While the Marxist notion
that hawkers were part of the ‘reactionary’ lumpen-proletariat was held by the large number
of academics who typically identified street vending ‘as part of the pre-modern traditional
economic order (Cross and Karides 2007, 21)’” (ibid.).
Even those observers whose attention focused outside the West continued to believe, as
Martha Chen notes in her work with WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing
& Organizing), “that the informal economy in developing countries would disappear once
these countries achieved sufficient levels of economic growth and modern industrial development” (M. A. Chen 2012). “Street vendors who congregated in capital cities throughout
the Global South,” note Cross and Karides, “presented a visible challenge to nations trying to
shape themselves into Western images of modernized society” (Cross and Karides 2007, 21).
Academic scholarship on the informal, however, has consistently stressed that unregulated
commercial activity, which constitutes an alternative to the standardized, restricted shops
and businesses controlled by the state, is a critical part of city life (Chen 2005; Cross and
Morales 2007; Evers and Seale 2015; Roy 2005, 2009; Vinit and Loukaitou-Sideris 2014).
British scholar Keith Hart is credited with the “discovery” of the informal economy after
a research trip to Accra, Ghana in the early 1970s, where he went to study the Frafras, a
north Ghanian group who were migrating to cities in the south and forming a large urban
sub-proletariat. During his fieldwork, Hart found a very large urban population untouched
by wage employment as well as a “chronic imbalance” between income from wage labor
and the basic costs of everyday life. To meet this gap, the urban poor had created a whole
plethora of work outside official sources—from backyard farming, to street trading, to
hustling of all kinds. Petty capitalism, Hart observed, made up of a vast array of “peddlers,
hawkers, vendors, and others with no fixed location, and without registering with or being
regulated by the government, [do] a massive amount of business on the side of the road”
(Hart 1973, 188). At the start of his influential essay Informal Income Opportunities and
Urban Employment in Ghana, Hart asks:
Does the reserve army of urban unemployed and underemployed really constitute a passive,
exploited majority in cities like Accra, or do their informal economic activities possess some
autonomous capacity for generating growth in the incomes of the urban (and rural) poor?
(Hart 1973, 61)
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A. GREENSPAN
“Petty capitalism, often as a supplement to wage-employment,” he concludes, “offers itself as
a means of salvation. Denied success by the formal opportunity structure, these members of
the urban sub-proletariat seek informal means of increasing their incomes” (Hart 1973, 67).
Following Hart, and similar work done by the International Labour Organization (ILO
1972) in Africa during the same period, ideas about the relationship between the informal
“sector” and a modern, capitalist economy began to shift. Later theorists of both the structuralist (Portes, Castells, and Benton 1989) and legalist schools (De Soto 1989), despite their
very different approaches, agreed that contrary to the traditional narratives of progress,
informal markets (alternatively named the “shadow economy,” underground economy,”
“black economy,” “grey economy,” “hidden economy,” “unobserved economy,” etc.) were not
disappearing from the newly mushrooming hypercities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America,
but rather continued to exist—and even flourish. The perseverance of informal work not
only “helps meet the needs of poor consumers by providing accessible and low-priced
goods and services, it also provides significant job and income generation for the newly
urbanized” (Becker 2004). The informal economy, then, particularly in zones experiencing
intense urbanization, should not be considered as simply a temporary phenomenon that
will one day be overcome.
In China, the vast and varied grey economy has played a critical role in the era of opening and reform (gaige kaifang改革开放). As soon as the rigidity of the planned economy
started to crack, informal markets began to emerge. There was, already in the later years of
the Cultural Revolution, as Frank Dikotter and others have documented, a silent revolution
that sought to escape malnutrition and starvation by creating underground black markets
in food production and—eventually—distribution. By 1980, Dikotter claims, nearly half of
the agriculture land in some provinces was already in private hands (Dikötter 2016). “After
the adoption of the economic reforms in 1978–1979,” concur Jonathan S. Bell and Anastasia
Loukaitou-Sideris, “the informal economy exploded … [from] a miniscule 0.17% of the
workforce in 1978,” and informal workers grew to encompass “over half (58.69%) of the
entire urban workforce by 2004” (Bell and Loukaitou-Sideris 2014, 225).
This explosive growth of the unplanned economy (Sarosh, Lee, and Gallagher 2011) coincided with a mass swell of urban migration. After 1978, millions of rural to urban migrants
found work in the city, as policies that had locked them in place for decades began to relax.
In response to these overwhelming processes—urbanization and the informalization of
labor—the party shifted its position from strictly banning all unregulated commercial activity to being relatively permissive of street vendors and outdoor markets (Solinger 2013).
The post-reform government had little choice. It was operating in the immediate aftermath
of the Cultural Revolution, and therefore as political scientist and social historian Dorothy
Solinger points out, had “to deal with the millions of youths ‘sent down’ to the countryside
during the prior decade who, returned to the cities, would otherwise have constituted a
huge unemployed mass” (Solinger 2013, 8).
Once unleashed, the bottom-up entrepreneurial energy of small, private businesses,
which operated on the margins of state control, proved vital to the powerful dynamism
of China’s growth (Huang 2008). Owners and workers in the myriad of small businesses
proved to be creative and flexible in ways that are lacking in the employees and managers
of more formal companies and state-owned enterprises.4 “The key to the country’s success,”
stated Franklin Allen plainly in a keynote speech at Tsinghua’s first International Finance
Conference in Beijing, “lies in its fast-growing ‘informal’ sector” (Allen, Qian, and Qian
FOOD, CULTURE & SOCIETY
79
2007). “While state-owned and publicly traded companies controlled by the government
grew at an annual rate of 4.65 per cent from 1995 to 1999,” he reported, “the informal sector
sped ahead at an annual rate of 19 per cent. During that same period, the informal sector
employed an average of 67.5 per cent of all non-agricultural workers in the country” (Allen,
Qian, and Qian 2007).
Thus, despite the rhetoric otherwise, the transition of urban economies from the messy
unruliness of street hawkers to well-ordered, clean and regulated shops, restaurants, and
roads is not just a natural evolution. Rather, the conception of economic growth in which a
“backward” black market progresses to a more “advanced” formal sphere is the product of a
(sometimes violent) struggle over future visions of the city with their embedded notions of
class, built environment, public space, urban citizenship and municipal authority (Bhowmik
2012; Cross 1998, 2000; Cross and Karides 2007).
Throughout these struggles, urban planners and their constituents who are dedicated
to progressive notions of “development” tend to treat the unruliness of street trade as a
problem. They castigate or criminalize street vendors “as sources of lost tax revenue, unfair
competition, social service burdens, sidewalk litter or public health concerns” (Alderslade,
Talmadge, and Freeman 2006, 1). “The more “developed” a society becomes,” notes the
Ccru (2001) in an article entitled “Markets on the Periphery, “the less comfortable it is with
market environments:
When compared to uncluttered boulevards and shops—especially exclusive ones—markets
are not very “nice”. Bourgeois (“civil” or “polite”) society is unanimous in condemning the
dirt, noise, and disorder of concrete markets, even when it espouses a measure of confidence
in abstract market principles. The state is encouraged to adopt wide-ranging responsibility
for protecting “the public” from markets, using the tools of regulation, policing, and urban
planning, which are enforced in the name of safety and hygiene. (Ccru 20015)
In Chinese cities, conflict over street food vending was frequent throughout the twentieth
century (J. Y. Chen 2012; Di 2003).6 In her book “Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor of
China 1900–1953,” Janet Y. Chen documents how, in 1946, during the civil war “as part of a
broad effort to clean up the city’s appearance (shi rong), Beijing Mayor Xiong Wu embarked
on successive campaigns to register itinerant vendors.” In an attempt to control the urban
destitute, “shantytowns would be torn down, peddlers banned and rickshaws prohibited.” In
Shanghai, too, there was a very definite effort to control migrants, particularly those from
Northern Jiangsu who were fleeing war and starvation. These refugees from Subei (Honig
1992) often earned money as itinerant vendors. “In Shanghai,” writes Chen, “an estimated
150,000 people scratched out a living by selling goods and services on the streets and in
makeshift stalls all over the city.” Much like today, the policing of this population involved
a drive to clean up the street. “Of the different blights on the city’s image identified by the
[clean up] campaign, the injunction against peddlers had the most immediate impact” (J.
Y. Chen 2012, 191). Chen documents tension over the policy on street vending that led to
a riot on November 30, 1946 with stones being thrown and shots being fired (J. Y. Chen
2012, 191).
In today’s urban China the task of displacing street vendors falls to municipal inspectors
known as chengguan (城管). Chengguan are not part of the official police and therefore
do not have the power to make arrests. They are, however, allowed to seize vendors’ carts,
confiscate all their goods and administer some fairly steep fines (Bell and Loukaitou-Sideris
2014; Swider 2015). Chengguan are generally made up of former state employees, the work
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A. GREENSPAN
is low paid and there is little if any training. In many cities across China the chengguan have
gained a general reputation for hooliganism. In a report entitled “Beat Him, Take Everything
Away: Abuses by China’s Chengguan Para-Police,” Human Rights Watch reports that:
Since its founding in 1997, China’s Chengguan Urban Management Law Enforcement (城管
执法), a para-police agency tasked with enforcing non-criminal urban administrative regulations, has earned a reputation for excessive force and impunity. The chengguan have become
synonymous among some Chinese citizens with arbitrary and thuggish behavior including
assaults on suspected administrative law violators (some of which lead to serious injury or
death), illegal detention, and abuses accompanying forceful confiscation of property. (2012, 1)
Spend time among the hawkers and you see their constant fear. When the word chengguan
is whispered a whole market, in a panicked instant, suddenly packs up and starts running.
If caught alone, individual vendors have little choice but to quietly surrender. A man selling
roasted potatoes is stopped at the crosswalk. He tries to run but his cart topples over and
all his vegetables spill out on the street. A flower hawker desperately pleads his case while
a crowd watches in sympathy, but he is surrounded. The chengguan lift his cart into a truck
and drive away. A family of bing (crepe or pancake) sellers who have designed their cart for
rapid mobility see someone out of the corner of their eye, and leave instantaneously. When
they realize it is a false alarm they slowly return (if caught everything will be confiscated
and the family will be forced to start again). When vendors are encircled and their wares
seized, crowds often gather and skirmishes break out over the apprehension of goods.
Occasionally there have been riots. As a result, the debates over chengguan are amongst the
most contentious issues in contemporary China. As the Human Rights report documents:
The Wall Street Journal reported that in mid-2010 the most common Chinese-language phrase
containing the term “chengguan” searched on Google was “chengguan beat people” (城管 打人).
In numerous recent Chinese state media editorials, the chengguan have been vilified with epithets
ranging from “the epitome of the evils of public power” or derided as law-breaking “X-Men … with
only basic means of attack such an iron stick, a piece of brick….” In October 2010, a very popular
video game across China was one that involved the player taking the role of a street vendor tasked
with having to “defeat 10 waves of attacks by the semi-official enforcers, known as chengguan.”
(2012, 23)
Clashes between street food vendors and those who seek to control the streets have played
out throughout the global modern urban landscape (Brown 2006; Graaff and Ha 2015;
Hansen et al. 2014). In 1964 the author Jean Merrill, inspired by her experience living in
Greenwich Village New York, penned a children’s novel on the topic called “The Pushcart
War.”7 More recently, a dramatic manifestation of the conflict took place in Hong Kong
during the Chinese New Year celebrations of 2016. As the city celebrated the arrival of the
year of the Fire Monkey, the old neighborhood of Mongkok descended into one of the most
violent riots in decades. A crackdown on the tradition of allowing itinerant vendors in the
days after New Year to sell snacks on the street culminated with armed police clashing with
the stone-throwing local supporters of illegal hawkers. The incident was quickly dubbed “the
fish-ball revolution” and comparisons were inevitably drawn to the death of a street vendor
that brought on the Arab Spring. Though protests in Hong Kong did not escalate, it is clear
from the events surrounding the deaths of the hawker Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia (the
catalyst for the Arab Spring), as well as Eric Garner (who was caught selling “loosies” in
New York and was one of the sparks of the Black Lives Matter movement), that there is, in
today’s global climate, a highly combustible combination of street vending, vigilant urban
management, and the viral spread of images across social media.
FOOD, CULTURE & SOCIETY
81
Yet, at the same time, this potent combination of globalization, urbanization, and digital
media is also feeding a growing appreciation for street food. In America, especially, this
coincides with the emergence of a “hipster” foodie culture associated with the food truck
movement, ceremonies like the “Vendy Awards,” 8 which are held in New York, Philadelphia,
and LA to honor the city’s best street food, and all night “fraves” featuring specialty vendors designed to insatiate an increasingly food-obsessed culture. At the 2015 conference
“Contesting the Street,” urban studies scholar Renia Ehrenfeucht remarked that there seems
to be a coming sea change in cultural attitudes regarding street vending:
Even in the U.S. where street commerce is severely restricted … the attention to food trucks
has created an opportunity to reconfigure street trade regulation and policy. Food trucks, along
with farmers markets, public markets, and sidewalk vending, have created a renaissance in
street commerce. (Ehrenfeucht 2016, 11)
Popular film and television has contributed to this cultural transformation. The movie
“Chef ” tells the story of a Michelin-star cook who needs to renew his creativity by returning
to the creative authenticity found in mobile street vending, while the TV celebrity Anthony
Bourdain has recently announced he would be opening a Blade Runner inspired street food
market in New York.9 This contemporary celebration of street food is hardly restricted to
America. The National Geographic television show “Street Food Around the World” features
episodes from Lima, Mexico City, and Marrakech. Street food tours in Hanoi and Penang
are amongst the city’s top attractions on Trip Advisor. In Taipei the Shilin night market is
famed as a place where both locals and tourists come to get a taste of Taiwan’s living cultural
heritage. Bourdain’s New York market is reportedly modeled on Singapore’s hawker stands,
which are both promoted heavily in tourist brochures but also regularly frequented by the
city’s middle-class families.
There is, then, a tension between an idealized clean and corporate modern city that is
highly restrictive of street vending, and a growing recognition of the value of street food and
street markets. In cities across the world including New York (Devlin 2017), Los Angeles
(Vallianatos 2017), Toronto (Hanser 2017), Mexico City (Hayden 2017), Delhi, and Mumbai
(Baviskar 2017) this has led to a host of experiments, which attempt to formalize the informal. One of the earliest and most interesting case studies is Singapore. In the 1950s, as the
city-state began its momentous transformation, there was, as in Shanghai today, a collision
between the public affection for street food and the negative image of hawkers (Ghani 2011).
As Lily Kong documents in her book on the Singapore Hawker Centers, street vendors were
seen to “conflict with goals of development,” as “small scale trading aligned with traditional
culture was not seen to benefit the goals of a modern city” (Kong 2007). Criticized for being
unhygienic, causing disorder, and interrupting traffic flow, street vendors were also seen
“to compete directly with the modern sector for land usage.” Municipal attempts to rid
the city of its many peddlers, however, led to widespread crackdowns and police violence.
Yet, in addition, and despite the desire to create a hyper-sanitized metropolis, authorities
nevertheless recognized the importance of street food, especially for the city’s working
class. Their solution was to develop a legal framework that would formalize street food,
forcing mobile food vendors—through a variety of economic strategies as well as a fierce
enforcement of anyone who did not comply—to settle in a controlled, well-ordered and
tightly managed environments. Singapore’s famous hawker stands are criticized for leaving
little space for much of what is most vital about the cultures, communities, and businesses
of the street, (Bender 2017). On the other hand, the Singapore version of a future sterilized
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city—“Disney with the death penalty” (Gibson 1993)—has found a way to make room
for the culinary culture embodied in street food both as a tourist attraction (Henderson
et al. 2012) and also for everyday use, with a majority of the middle-class urban population
regularly using them as a way to feed their families.
In contrast, Shanghai futurism, at least so far, has shown little regard for street food. The
city’s impulse, as has been shown, has been to clean up, rather than to preserve the food
that is sold on the street. The few exceptions, like the faux ancient Yuyuan garden and the
canal town of Zhujiajiao, are in tourist locations where the cultural value of street food is
promoted through highly formalized, state-supported businesses that sell “official” traditional small snacks. Informal vendors who trade in these locations are subject to increasingly
strict control. For many years, for example, just steps away from Yuyuan garden, there was
the vibrant Sipailou Lu night market. The dense and crowded corridor featured mostly
migrant vendors who sold everything from stinky tofu, to big bone soup, fried noodles,
and barbecue skewers. By the summer of 2016, however, prompted in part by complaints by
the more regulated vendors at Yuyuan, informal street vending in the old city was stamped
out, and this area—like so many others in the downtown core—was slated to be “cleaned
up,” sanitized and redeveloped.10
Another example of how the formalization of street food is intertwined with Shanghai’s
state-directed process of urban gentrification (He 2007) is found in the city’s “red carts,”
formalized food trucks that are sparsely located along some of main thoroughfares. Red
carts, called “aixin bang bang che ” or “the cart of love and help,” all belong to a single
company, the Shanghai Aoshika Restaurant Management Co., which in 2007 negotiated
a monopoly on licensed food trucks in the city.11 In a branding exercise that is meant to
instill recognition and trust, carts follow an identical design and vendors—who are meant
to hold Shanghai hukou— are offered official training and are told to wear hats and masks
when cooking for the customers. The company also provides a loudspeaker that blares the
same repeated message on a loop. The Shanghai Aoshika Restaurant Management claims
that if anyone gets sick from eating at one of their carts they will reimburse all the medical
payments.12 Vendors are offered insurance and minimal guaranteed baseline salary, but also
have to pay the company a monthly fee. Crucially, however, the food in the red carts in also
strictly controlled by this monopolistic company, which is the only allowed supplier and
regulates what can be sold. All red carts offer the same baozi and soy milk in the morning,
fried chicken for the afternoon, and Taiwan-style pancake and drinks all day. Any deviation
is forbidden.
Both of these experiments clearly demonstrate the limitations to formalization: the
loss of flavor and variety, the lack of cultural energy, the flatness of the street life
they engender (Hanser 2017). Most importantly, due to their limited availability, their
increased expense and heightened bureaucratization, formalized street food is most
often inaccessible to the city’s newest migrants, who—both as consumers and producers—are those who need it most. It is perhaps fortunate, therefore, that in China the
process of formalization is not as smooth, or as strict, as it sounds. Shanghai’s ever-inventive informal economy gets around the regulations in a variety ways. First, some of
the red carts you see on the streets are fake. Many news reports tell of vendors obtaining
similar-looking carts and having them refashioned to look like the real thing so that
they can sell their own food without any license or registration. Second, as some of
my students discovered when getting to know a friendly vendor named Li Fei, vendors
FOOD, CULTURE & SOCIETY
83
sometimes use the carts to sell their own—more popular—food. Li Fei, for example,
made a living by using a red cart to sell his own version of beef soup（淮南牛肉汤), a
local delicacy he learnt from his hometown in Anhui.13
These stories, about the ways in which formality is actively subverted, are suggestive
of an important strategy, which, following Chisun Chiu’s work on Taipei’s Shilin night
market, we might conceptualize as an interactive and negotiated performance. Chiu draws
on sociologist Erving Goffman’s ideas to discuss how a kind of loose policing based on
staged theatricality can be used as a successful mode of urban governance. His analysis of
the community-based micropolitics of Shilin shows this strategy at work in Taipei’s most
famous street market. While Shilin has been purportedly formalized, there are nevertheless
many informal vendors who remain at its margins. They exist through implicit agreements,
both with other vendors—who benefit from their ability to attract customers, as well as
sharing in the rent—and also with the police, who avoid visiting the market during peak
hours (Chiu 2013, 346). When the police do arrive, vendors make a point of “dramatising
their activities to give police and shoppers the image or impression that they are following
regulations and that the police have things under control” (Chiu 2013, 345). This negotiated
performance, claims Chin, allows Taipei to “pursue a more modern or more global urban
image while also tolerating a certain degree of “informality” (Chiu 2013, 343). In so doing,
it can “help us understand how an informal economy may coexist with a formal one in
developed societies.”
In their study of migrant vendors Ryanne Flock and Werner Breitung (2015) also examine
this mode of localized quasi-formalization. Drawing on Jeff Wasserstrom’s work on strategies for dealing with protest in China (Wasserstrom 1991) they theorize this soft approach
to urban governance as a kind of political theater. Vendors act in concert with the police
in an elaborate performance that is based on temporal rhythms—both in terms of the day
and the calendar year—as well as spatial delineations. “There are no peddlers on, but only
around the pedestrian streets,” they write in their study of Guangzhou:
They stand at borders, corners, streets, and alleys. Forbidden zones are surrounded by several
layers of varying strictness of control, decreasing with increasing distance. Hawkers use this
differentiation for strategic withdrawal, to go back and forth, in and out, lingering at the edges,
always looking for a promising selling spot. They can leave the scene to come back at a later
moment or even hide in plain sight, standing in front of security guards, but behind the flowerpots that designate the end of the pedestrian area. (Flock and Breitung 2015, 6)
Similar patterns of behavior, these “small maneuvers and negotiations that produce the city,”
which Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria calls the “slow boil” of the street (Anjaria 2016, 8), are often
found in Shanghai as vendors establish covert working relationships with the chengguan.
At preset times, when the officials are on duty, peddlers pack up their wares onto moveable
trikes or disappear into a nearby storefront only to set up again the moment the chengguan
are gone.14 Despite increasingly vigorous attempts at forced gentrification, the unplanned,
shadow economy has yet to be fully contained. Street vendors, the most visible face of the
informal economy, are still around, as are informal waste recyclers, pirated stands selling
CDs, DVDs, and books, and markets in shanzhai electronics.15 These pockets of the grey
economy are more abundant in the outlying villages on the urban edges, where the city is
not yet fully formed. Here the main street is made up solely of small shops: one selling plastic buckets and basic household goods, another selling meat, another vegetables. The most
basic trader sets up business with no more than a bucket carrying a single fish. Clusters of
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this informal trade, however, can be found even in the wealthiest zones of the urban core
as the shadow economy spills out of an uncontrolled and uncontrollable periphery.
In his three-volume exploration “Civilization and Capitalism,” historian Fernand Braudel
takes pains to distinguish the capitalism of large monopoly-driven corporations from the
self-organizing, decentralized realm of small businesses and little shops, which always
exist in a “layer beneath.” Throughout his historical analysis, Braudel shows that these
two economic realms—a capitalist order consisting of monopolistic corporations and a
substratum of market activity—have both been at work for centuries. In addition to the
large state-oriented dealings of the East India Company, for example, there was a vast and
hybrid traffic of smaller “pirate” trade. While the more centralized and organized economic
order is more visible, Braudel repeatedly draws attention to “the enormous creative powers
of the market,” which continually exist underneath and alongside it (Braudel 1984, 631).
Drawing on Braudel, theorist Manuel de Landa reinforces this differentiation (or even
opposition) between the capitalism of large corporations (which he names anti-markets)
and the self-organizing, decentralized realm of small businesses and shops that constitute
the markets of the street (Delanda 1996). This “anti-market capitalism” tends to dismiss the
small-scale business of the “local economy, as drivers of wealth, enterprise and stability in
communities.” Yet, the secret of the top layer of economic life, Braudel insists, lies in the
strength it draws from the “lower story of exchange” (Braudel 1984).
Even in fully formalized systems, the informal can often sneak its way back in, continuing
to function as a hidden element. This is the case, for example, in New York’s highly regulated
street food trucks. In Manhattan, there are no makeshift stalls with migrant vendors selling
jianbing (egg pancakes), which are a staple of urban China. Instead, there is “Mr. Bing” a
Vendy award-winning food truck, headed by a former equity trader who fell in love with
this favorite Chinese street snack and decided to bring it back to America as a business.16
To do this “Mr. Bing” required a license, since in New York there is no way to operate a
food truck without a permit. Yet coveted food truck permits are strictly limited (having
been strictly capped under Mayor Koch). It is thus an open secret that there is a thriving
and hugely profitable black-market trade in vending licenses in New York.
Today, in urban China, a state-sponsored capitalism seeks both to eradicate the messy
chaos of informal businesses that sell on the street, whilst simultaneously recognizing their
value. Faced with a growing economic downturn, the Chinese government—under a policy
named Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation (大众创业、万众创新) is actively promoting small-scale entrepreneurial activity as a critical economic driver. For those interested
in preserving the city’s street food this may be good news. Mr. Wu Gencheng is a famous
hawker, who sells the most popular scallion pancakes (cong you bing 葱油饼) in Shanghai.17
Last year, his stall, “Ada Scallion,” was shut down for operating without a license. It was
saved, however, when a well-known food delivery app, “Elema,” helped sponsor Mr. Wu’s
licensing and relocation. Similarly, the much-loved Menghua wonton shop, whose closure
was met with protest, was also allowed to continue its operations in a more formalized
outpost. Both stalls benefited from the intervention of premier Li Keqiang, who appealed
directly on behalf of both Ada scallion and Menghua wonton, arguing that they should be
considered prime examples of the “mass entrepreneurship” that the state is so eager to promote. Shanghai’s city government has recently announced a policy to learn from Taipei and
open night markets in several districts of the city. We have yet to see how it will handle the
delicate mix between an informal culture that is key to the variety, taste, and entrepreneurial
FOOD, CULTURE & SOCIETY
85
dynamism of street food and the authoritarian desire for a strictly controlled commercial
sector. For street food fans, the trend in recent years has been disheartening. Perhaps, however, there are signs—in the case of Ada Scallion, Menghua Wonton, and the recent night
market policies—that Shanghai is beginning to shift, and to recognize that alongside—or
in between—the dazzling lights of skyscrapers, street life, street markets, and street food
are also critical to the making of the twenty-first-century city.
Notes
1.
Courtesan culture, as many scholars have documented, played a critical role in the making
of modern Shanghai. See, for example, Yeh, Catherine Vance. Shanghai love: Courtesans,
Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910. University of Washington Press; Braudel,
Fernand, The Perspective of the World: Civilization & Capitalism 15th-Eighteenth Century.
Harper & Row 1984; Lee, Leo Ou-fan. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban
Culture in China, 1930–1945. Harvard University Press, 1999; Liang, Samuel Y. “Mapping
Modernity in Shanghai: Space, Gender, and Visual Culture in the Sojourners” City 1853–
98.” Sojourners 1853: 98, 2010.
2.
Other “civilization campaigns” implemented in the lead-up to the Shanghai Expo targeted
the local habits of hanging laundry outside and the wearing of pajamas out of doors.
3.
http://www.sh-streetfood.org/features/.
4.
In an article in the LA Times, consultant and educator Randy Pollock tells a familiar story
that lays bare the unimaginative repetition displayed by his class of middle managers. His
article centers on a group of Chinese MBA students whom he challenged to “brainstorm
two-hour business plans. I divided them into six groups, gave them detailed instructions and
an example: a restaurant chain. The more original their idea, the better, I stressed—and we’d
vote for a prize winner…. In the end, five of the six groups presented plans for, you guessed it,
restaurant chains. The sixth proposed a catering service” (Pollock 2009). For China to break its
students out of this mold and do a better job of teaching risk-taking originality, he suggests,
people should pay heed to the baozi stand and jianbing sellers run by the cities’ newcomers.
China, he concludes, needs to “harness the same inventive energy of the street markets and
small-time entrepreneurs and put it in the schools” (Pollock 2009).
5.
The full text is available here: http://www.ccru.net/archive/markets.htm.
6.
I am grateful to Jeffrey Wasserstrom for pointing out these passages by Janet Y Chen. Personal
communication, February 2016.
7.
Thanks to Alfonso Morales for this reference.
8.
See: http://www.vendyawards.streetvendor.org/.
9.
http://www.bourdainmarket.com/about.
10. http://ima.nyu.sh/documentation/2015/05/13/stories-on-sipailou-road-and-danfeng-roadby-li-jiawei-and-bai-hailun/.
11. https://medium.com/@xz1076/the-red-cart-a-step-to-formalization-567443ebccd6#.
p9jee3ze3.
12. Food safety is an enormously important issue in China. Its impact on debates over street food
is beyond the scope of this paper.
13. https://medium.com/@anita.bonomi/li-fei-street-food-vending-in-shanghai-a30995c432e4#.
fe4sp4twt.
14. http://ima.nyu.sh/documentation/2015/05/12/the-small-street-food-community-michellehuang/.
15. For more on shanzhai see Anna Greenspan, Silvia Lindtner and David Li. “Designed in
Shenzhen: Shanzhai Manufacturing and Maker Entrepreneurs.” Aarhus Conference on
Critical Alternatives, 2015; Anna Greenspan, Silvia Lindtner and David Li. “Shanzhai:
China’s Collaborative Electronics Design System.” Atlantic, May 18, 2014. Bobbie
Johnson. Shanzhai! Wired, July 12, 2010; Sky Canaves and Juliet Ye. “Imitation Is the Sincerest
Form of Rebellion in China.” Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2009; Josephine Ho. “Shanzhai:
86
A. GREENSPAN
Economic/Cultural Production through the Cracks of Globalization.” Crossroads Plenary
Speech, 2010.
16. https://www.mr-bing.com/.
17. https://culinarybackstreets.com/cities-category/shanghai/2012/a-da-cong-you-bing/.
Acknowledgements
This paper was written with the help of the “City Food” project, headed by Dr. Krishnendu Ray,
as well as the students in the author’s street food class at NYU Shanghai and all the collaborators
involved in Moveable Feasts.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Anna Greenspan is Assistant Professor of Global Contemporary Media at NYU Shanghai. Her current
research interests include critical cartography, street markets, and the informal economy, wireless
media, Chinese modernity, and the philosophy of technology. Anna’s latest book, Shanghai Future:
Modernity Remade, was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. She maintains a personal
website at www.annagreenspan.com.
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