23
SHANGHAI, STREET FOOD AND
THE MODERN METROPOLIS
Anna Greenspan
Shanghai’s Laoximen (old west gate) neighborhood, which lies in between the former French
concession and the historic old city, is the perfect place from which to view the city’s ongoing
process of transformation. While other parts of the downtown core seem somewhat settled, here
one is still able to bear witness to the intensity of China’s contemporary urban transformation.
Just a few blocks to the west of Laoximen lies Xintiandi, one of the richest areas of the city, while
further to the east, near the river, is an area known as Dongjiadu. Demolition in Dongjiadu began
in 2007 in the lead-up to World Expo. For many years, during the peak of the financial crises,
however, little construction occurred. Migrant workers settled in, planting farms and gardens,
and a vibrant market in food and textiles flourished amidst the rubble. By 2017, however, the
cranes returned and the cluster of high-end commercial and residential buildings that form the
‘Dongjiadu Master Plan’ are again under construction. Between these two areas lies what remain
of the narrow streets and low-rise structures of the older metropolis.
When I first moved to Laoximen in 2016 people came from miles around, attracted to the
Zhaozhou lu night market, whose highlights included ‘Er Guang Hundun,’ a tiny shop specializing in peanut-flavored wontons whose tables spilled onto the sidewalk and which was famously
visited by celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain on his televised trip to the city. Equally popular was
‘Lao Shaoxing Doujiang,’ an all-night stand cooking youtiao 油条 and doujiang 豆浆 (fried bread
and soy milk) that attracted a mixture of locals who lined up in their pajamas as well as clubbers
who dropped by in their fancy cars. In between these two stands that bordered the block was a
cluster of other businesses, including a microbrewery, a skewer stand and a full Sichuanese restaurant.1 Tangjiawan, the oldest farmers market in the city, which was built in 1903, was located
just around the corner.
As late as August 2016 the street was still lively – a stubborn hold-out from an earlier epoch.
Yet just one month later the houses and shops were empty, the whole block was boarded up and
the market was gone. Zhaozhou lu, which is poised between Xintiandi, one of Shanghai’s wealthiest neighborhoods, and the ‘old city,’ one of its poorest, has been slotted for redevelopment. By
February 2017 the Tangjiawan market closed its doors. Today, a few formalized food trucks dot
the area, ‘Er Guang Hundun’ has moved into a formal restaurant nearby, and youtiao and doujiang
are only available in a fancy cafeteria in Xintiandi. Instead of street markets, the area is filled with
the blue and white prefab walls that form the temporary housing for migrant workers. At night
giant machines roar, like prehistoric beasts, devouring an older urban fabric. Construction is
321
Anna Greenspan
hidden by vast billboards advertising the ‘sophisticated’ and ‘luxurious living’ complexes that are
rapidly rising from the ground.
Laoximen is a vivid reminder that in trying to build itself as a future city, (Greenspan 2014;
Wasserstrom 2008), Shanghai’s municipal leaders are operating with a model of development
that views street markets and street life as backwards and uncultured; a past that needs to be
‘cleaned up’ and swept away (Brown 2006; Hansen, Little, and Milgram 2013). In the last decade
government-sponsored clean-up campaigns have targeted vendors of all types. There have also
been coordinated drives against hanging laundry and people wearing pajamas (an old Shanghai
custom that, in the lead-up to the World Expo, was deemed uncouth). In the winter of 2016,
the move to ‘civilize’ the city targeted the Chinese tradition of setting off fireworks to celebrate
the New Year and welcome the god of wealth. Throughout the holiday period the custom was
banned inside Shanghai’s outer ring road. The city launched a massive offensive, covering the
streets with banners, employing 300,000 volunteers and setting massive anti-firework fines. A
tradition that had chaotically erupted for centuries was abruptly silenced. Shanghai’s image of
modernity is clean and well ordered. Maintaining this image requires a constant struggle against
the unplanned, out-of-control messiness of street markets, street culture and street life (Solinger
2013; Olds 1997; Campanella 2012).
Modernist urban planning, which has typically called for regulation from above and insisted
that city building was left in the hands of trained experts, has long been intent on the destruction
of the street (Berman 1983; Caro 1974; Jacobs 1992). This top-down approach reached a pinnacle in the architectural writings of Le Corbusier. “The plan must rule,” he asserts in his articulation of the ‘City of Tomorrow,’ “the street must disappear” (Le Corbusier 1987). According to Le
Corbusier’s vision, organic, chaotic and haphazard towns with their winding streets and alleyways
would give way to a well-planned and tightly zoned city filled with manicured parks, high-rises
and rationally ordered roads (Le Corbusier 1987). “Man walks in a straight line because he has
a goal and knows where he is going,” wrote Le Corbusier in his typically dictatorial style, “the
modern city lives by the straight line” (Le Corbusier 1987). Likewise, in his work on the modernist city of Brasilia, a city planned without streets, urban theorist James Holsten details how
the discipline of ‘urban organization’ viewed ‘the elimination of the street’ as a prerequisite. “The
street,” writes Holsten, is “considered an impediment to progress because it fails to accommodate
the needs of the machine age” (Holston 1989: 248).
Faced with the modernist ambition to build the city of tomorrow, the mobile street vendor
has found himself or herself as an explicit target (Cardoso, Companion, and Marras 2014). In
his essay ‘Pushcart Evil,’ D. M. Bluestone documents how this situation has unfolded in America, where there has been a “centuries old efforts by municipalities to regulate and control
street commerce” (Bluestone 1991: 68). The article begins in 1936, with a successful campaign
in Manhattan to remove vendors from the streets by placing them in covered markets. In the
name of ‘advancing social progress’ municipal officials hoped to mark the end of the pushcart,
which they felt had “long outlived its usefulness in this day of modern, quick, sanitary distribution of foods” (Bluestone 1991: 68). This was not the first of New York’s pushcart bans,
however. Bluestone points to an ordinance forbidding ‘street hucksters’ from as early as 1691
(Bluestone 1991).
Such urban policies, which take aim at the street vendor, are often quite explicit about their
class-based motivation and strategies for control. (Cardoso, Companion, and Marras 2014). The
clash between unregulated street vendors and a more ordered capitalist development is a means
for the (often newly) wealthy to carve out zones of urban living that are separated from frequent
and intimate contact with the urban poor (Fishman 1987). The aim of anti-street vending campaigns, argues Bluestone, was to “erase the vestiges of an older and decidedly less refined tradition
322
Shanghai, street food and the modern metropolis
of urban commerce; at the same time extending upper-class ideals of public decorum and social
separation to one of the least ordered spaces of the modern city – the street” (Bluestone 1991: 69).
Arvind Rajagopal, in his article ‘The Menace of Hawkers,’ tracks a similar process in Mumbai.
His work conceptualizes the hawker (or pheriwala) – whom, he notes, not only belongs to the
informal economy but indeed provoked the concept itself – as “a contested figure of Indian
modernity” (Rajagopal 2004: 236). By exploring the tensions between middle-class activists and
the pheriwala, Rajagopal shows how protests in favor of “clean streets and sidewalks, unobstructed
movement of traffic” are used to delegitimize the “unruly energy” of an “older consumption
aesthetic” (Rajagopal 2004: 236).
This same impetus, which has been particularly well documented in the case of India (Anjaria
2016; Bhowmik 2005) that equates urban development with a battle against the street, has also
informed the modernizing processes of urban China. Di Wang, whose book Street Culture in
Chengdu tracks this transformation in what is now the capital of Sichuan Province, details the
enormously rich street culture of the pre-modern city. Everyday life for common people, who
mostly lived in meager homes, happened largely outdoors. “Urban residents, especially the poor,
used the street as their shared space for everyday greater freedom for various activities related to
their livelihood and recreation,” he writes (Wang 2013: 2). From their beginnings, modernizing
efforts in Chengdu were directed against this grassroots social life. Reformers “felt that how the
street looked was an indicator of the city’s well being” (Wang 2013: 134) and “considered displays of traditional culture representative of the ‘old’ order and therefore ‘backward.”’ Under the
influence of a ‘Western-imitative civilization’ (wenming) and ‘enlightenment’ (qimeng), municipal
officials sought to “improve the streets and enhance the city’s image.” In the face of an onslaught
of regulation “commoners had to struggle to maintain their claim to the street” (Wang 2013: 3).
Chengdu is just but one example. In her comprehensive essay ‘Streets as Suspect,’ Dorothy
Solinger documents the many phases of the communist party’s hostile campaigns aimed against
the informal culture and commerce of the street. “Streets – or to be specific, those who seek
to situate themselves on them in order to earn their sustenance,” she writes, “are suspect in the
eyes of the leadership of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and have ever been so” (Solinger
2013: 3). The communist government’s adversity to an inherently out-of-control street life and
street culture was evident from the start. “Immediately upon the entry of the victorious People’s Liberation Army into the major metropolises of the country in the second half of 1949,
a ban was imposed on unregistered peddlers, along with one on beggars” (Solinger 2013: 6). In
the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward there was a short-lived hiatus. For a few years street
vending was permitted so as to counter the massive shortages brought on by the policies of centralized planning. Yet, as Solinger writes, these emergent markets “soon struck fear of a return of
capitalism into the consciousness of the omnipotent Party chief, Mao Zedong”(Solinger 2013:
7). Soon after, an even stricter ban was imposed. During the decade of the Cultural Revolution
informal vending all but disappeared. “Even while choking the streets with youthful parading
and ravaging partisans,” Solinger notes, party policy “nonetheless erased all visible emblems of
capitalism and its culture, rendering even the stuff of the tiniest outdoor fresh food marts contraband” (Solinger 2013: 7).
This familiar rhythm in which the strict control of street markets is followed by a loosening
of power was again repeated in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution (Solinger
2013; Dikötter 2016). Throughout the 1980s China witnessed a dramatic expansion of informal
vending – this time tied to mass urbanization. By the early 1990s, however, as Solinger documents, the underlying suspicion against street markets once again resurfaced as the initial period
of Opening and Reform (gaige kaifang), which was driven primarily by a vibrant bottom-up
sector of small, private entrepreneurs from the countryside giving way to a second phase geared
323
Anna Greenspan
towards state-owned enterprises and giant multinational corporations (Y. Huang 2008). The
country became obsessed with “nurturing giant firms and enticing international investors” and,
as a result, policy “morphed from promoting markets of any kind (in the 1980s and most of the
1990s) to fostering colossal companies whose success was not to be undermined by the petty
capitalists who would ply their trade outside” (Solinger 2013). The contemporary moment of
tightening had begun:
Laid-off workers who had been free to ply service and commercial trades from 1998
to around 2003 without much interference were summarily hounded off the streets.
Night markets were shut down or shunted onto the back-street alleyways in major
cities, pavements in the heart of town were cleared of anything resembling business.
Stall-keepers were herded into tall buildings, where, of course, their interactions with
potential purchasers were necessarily cut back, as the passersby who might have been
their customers were much less likely to go indoors than they were to stop by an outdoor stall to seek out what they needed.
(Solinger 2013: 17)
In Shanghai, as current developments around Laoximan clearly illustrate, the economic pressure
against street-level trade has been further reinforced by the increasing importance of real estate
development as the main source of revenue for municipal governments. This is a common
dynamic. “Struggles for space,” writes John Cross, “are particularly acute in downtown areas,
especially in cities where the local government and business want to ‘renovate’ urban areas for
tourism or to increase local real-estate values” (Cross and Karides 2007).
In urban China, with its skyrocketing real estate prices, “local officialdom has taken to
putting a very high premium upon ‘modernizing’ and ‘beautifying’ its visage (shirong urban
appearance)” (Solinger 2013: 13). To take but one example, the night market on Sipailou Lu, a
dense and crowded corridor just off the main thoroughfare of Fangbang Zhong Lu in Shanghai’s
old city neighborhood, was, for many years, a particularly lively zone. The street, which was
once the site of a Ming dynasty Confucian temple, evolved into a famous food market, where
vendors – mostly migrants – sold everything from stinky tofu, big bone soup and fried noodles
to barbecue skewers. The Sipailou market, however, was located just steps away from one of
Shanghai’s main tourist attractions, the faux ancient Yuyuan garden. By the summer of 2016,
prompted in part by the state-supported business that sell small snacks at Yuyuan, informal street
vending in the old city was almost completely eradicated, as this area – like so many others in the
downtown core – was slated to be ‘cleaned up,’ and redeveloped. Increasingly concerned about
what they perceived as ‘world aesthetic standards,’ Shanghai has fostered a sensibility that held,
as Solinger writes, that “city streets needed to be sanitized, scoured of the unsightly, especially
emptied of those whose ‘suzhi ‘ or quality is thought to be inferior, whether unlicensed peddlers,
migrants from the countryside, or, finally, the less educated workers thrown aside by their old
employers in the state-owned firms after the mid 1990s” (Solinger 2013: 14). As the government
sought to attract the eye of the investor, the urban thoroughfares came to be “reserved for the
demolition teams and for the shopping sprees of the well-off; the very poor had no right to the
city streets themselves” (Solinger 2013: 16). Contemporary Shanghai, then, has adopted a mainstream modernist legacy, which pits urban ‘progress’ against the informal markets of the street
(Roy 2005; Portes, Benton, and Lauren 1989; Chen 2005). For the past decades, throughout the
city, but especially in the urban core, street vendors and mobile stalls have been replaced with
chain stores and shopping malls, and almost all the great clusters of street food in the downtown
center have been lost.
324
Shanghai, street food and the modern metropolis
Moveable Feasts
Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner viscerally depicts the layered nature of the cyberpunk vision
of the future city. A flying craft drifts past super-tall skyscrapers illuminated by giant screens.
As the craft floats past, the camera pans down, following the slope of a neon dragon advertising
what lies below. It comes to rest in a dark and rainy alley where the hero Deckard sits perched
at a noodle stall. Though Blade Runner was set in Los Angeles 2019, it was filmed on location
in 1980s Taipei. Today, the film is a striking early recognition that the Asian metropolis, with its
dense and complex strata, is vital to the imagination and creation of our now global urban future.
Critical to the intensity of this urban imaginary is that alongside the flying cars and illuminated
towers, there are also the smells, sounds and tastes of street food.
My work on Shanghai’s street snacks was sparked by an increasing apprehension that, as the
city emerges as a twenty-first-century hub, the rich and layered nature of its urban fabric is being
destroyed. In line with a modernist agenda – already centuries old – that sees control of the
street as central to economic progress and urban development (Bluestone Daniel 1991; Holston
1989; Berman 1983), Shanghai is replacing its alleyway noodle stands with brightly lit fast food
chains and shopping malls. It does so with the paradoxical aim to ‘catch up’ with the idealized
(and homogenous) vision of a global city that has already established itself elsewhere (Roy 2009).
The project Moveable Feasts began in June 2013 with a call to “designers, artists, scholars,
students and foodies of all types to come map, document, co-create, re-invent and preserve Shanghai’s street food.” The initial brainstorming meeting was held in Shanghai’s first hacker space,
Xinchejian. Those gathered noted with some alarm that whereas street food elsewhere was being
celebrated with food trucks, ‘vendy awards’ and reality TV, the culinary culture of Shanghai’s
小吃 xiaochi (small snacks) was under threat. Moveable Feasts was established with the aim “to
research, savor, catalogue, preserve, and engage with the city’s rich street food heritage.” In the
spring of 2015, after connecting with Krishnendu Ray’s project on City Food based at New York
University (NYU), Moveable Feasts was developed into a digital humanities classroom–based
project that focused on the tools of critical cartography (Kim 2015; Cosgrove 1999) in order to
map the city’s changing street food landscape (www.sh-streetfood.org). Small groups of student
researchers, both Chinese and foreign, worked together to map over 200 vendors and, through
interviews and other modes of embedded research, uncover the stories from the streets: Who are
the vendors and where are they from? What are their working conditions? What kinds of spaces
do they inhabit, and what types of spatial arrangements do they make possible? What opportunities are open to them? What challenges do they face? What are their ties to other vendors, to
the neighborhood and to the food that they cook and serve?2
The pages that follow examine three interrelated contexts which shape the contemporary
street food landscape in Shanghai: 1) high-speed urbanization, 2) internal migration and 3) the
life and culture of the street. Drawing on the research conducted for Moveable Feasts, it shows
that street food provides an intimate lens onto the vast cultural and socioeconomic transformations underway in Shanghai, as one of the largest and fastest-growing cities in China aims to forge
itself into the model of a modern metropolis of the twenty-first century.
Urbanization
Shanghai, as I have written elsewhere (Greenspan 2014), was by the beginning of the millennium at the forefront of the fastest and most intense process of urbanization the world has ever
known (Khanna 2010; Saunders 2010). “A third of the world’s population is on the move this
century,” writes author Doug Saunders. Yet unlike the wave of urbanization that accompanied
325
Anna Greenspan
the modernization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this time the “flows are almost all
occurring in the so called ‘developing world’” (Roy 2009). Throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, the villages of the countryside are emptying out. In 2007 the threshold
was crossed. For the first time in history fifty percent of the world’s population are urban dwellers
(McNeill 2007). Megacities are mushrooming everywhere. National Geographic reports that in
1950 New York was the only city in the world with a population over ten million; by 2015 there
are over thirty of these giant cities (Zwingle and Franklin 2002). “The age of nations is over,”
contends Parag Khanna in Foreign Policy’s 2010 special issue Metropolis Now. “The new urban
age has begun” (Khanna 2010). Nowhere is the global transformation from rural to urban life
more intense than in China, where urbanization is faster and larger than ever before (Campanella
2012). In 1980 under twenty percent of China’s population lived in its cities. Today it is over
forty percent. Government officials predict that the urban population will surpass 700 million in
the next five years, exceeding the number of rural dwellers for the first time. McKinsey Global
forecasts that by the year 2030 there will be a billion people living in Chinese cities (McKinsey &
Co. 2009). Almost one-third of contemporary Shanghai’s approximately twenty-five million
people are migrants, with almost eighty percent of those arriving from the Chinese countryside.
The high-speed process of urbanization that has shaped the country in the past decades has
been enormously dependent on the informal economy (Huang 2009), which not only can
provide a livelihood for the undocumented but also constitutes an ‘alternative culinary infrastructure’3 that can produce and distribute low-cost goods and services. Most importantly, street
vending is not very capitally intensive and is also a business that can be easily set up with family
and friends. In the most primitive of urban markets, in Shanghai as elsewhere, new vendors need
only a blanket and a basket of goods. Street hawking therefore offers an attractive entrepreneurial
opportunity for the newly urbanized, and this mode of informal entrepreneurship is crucial for
the urban poor both as consumers and as producers (Neuwirth 2012; Hart 1973; Soto 2002;
Portes, Benton, and Lauren 1989). In China, as entrepreneurial migrants poured into the coastal
cities, they often turned to the business of street food in the hope of enriching both themselves
and their families back home.
In cities across the country, one of the most popular of these regional delicacies is the Shandong jianbing (egg pancake) – a thin crepe that is cooked on an iron griddle and garnished with
fresh herbs, pickles and dried chili. The crepe is most often filled with an egg, smeared with
various sweet and spicy sauces and wrapped around a flat, crispy fried cracker. While hawkers
selling this tasty breakfast snack are found in almost every urban neighborhood, most, as two of
my students discovered, originate from the same tiny village called Youlou, which is located in the
remote mountain regions of Shandong Province (Chen and Roscoe 2015).4 Until very recently,
Youlou suffered from extreme poverty, relying on the growing and harvesting of honeysuckle as
the primary form of income. Starting in the 1990s, however, villagers started to migrate, gravitating towards an entrepreneurial life as jianbing sellers on the streets of China’s first-tier cities.
They adapted the traditional snack to local taste and modified the cooking style of the crepe by
heating it on a makeshift oil barrel stove so that it was faster and easier to prepare. They also found
ways to adjust the taste so that it would appeal to local urban residents (in Shanghai this involves
adding a sweet, syrupy sauce). Soon the jianbing industry exploded. The pancake became a wildly
popular breakfast snack in the exploding megacities of China. Today a database known as the
Youlou People’s National Network connects migrant villagers who want to find good locations
for their jianbing stands. It also provides lists of different recipes that appeal to the varying tastes
of the different regions throughout China. In Shanghai, jianbing stands, which can still be found
tucked into the back alleys of even the busiest roads, are one of the city’s great culinary delights.
Villagers from Youlou monopolize the trade in jianbing and have generated millions of renminbi,
326
Shanghai, street food and the modern metropolis
transforming their own lives, as well as paying for housing and infrastructure in their hometown.
One woman, when asked about the changes in her village from the trade in jianbing, replied
simply by saying: ‘Now the village is crazy rich.’
Migration
In the spring of 2014, outside the campus of East China Normal University, near the durian
sellers and the young men roasting Xinjiang kebabs, a couple from the far north city of Harbin
set up to sell squid off the back of a three-wheeled bike. Their bike was equipped with a table
upon which they carefully laid out tentacles and body parts of various sizes. A large banner
advertised the prices: from 3 RMB for a stick of tentacles to 10 RMB for a whole squid. Flavor
was added from an array of bottles filled with a variety of spices. These and the iron grill, claimed
the woman, are the specialty of Harbin. The woman’s face was hard, and she chain smoked while
she spoke. The man was softer, silent. Both wore crisply starched white chef hats. They left their
job a year ago selling vegetables in the wet market, the woman told me, in order to migrate to
Shanghai. “In Harbin life was too hard, it was too cold. Your spit froze before it hit the ground.”
Shanghai is a migrant city (Lu 1999; Wasserstrom 2008; Bergère 2009). Like all deeply cosmopolitan places, its cuisine is hybrid. Common dishes include mutated imports like the breaded
pork cutlets (zha zhu pa i 炸猪排) served with Worcestershire sauce, which spread from the
European restaurants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and are now found in
noodle and dumpling shops around town, as well as more internal hybrids like the Sichuanese
spicy tofu (mapo dofu 麻婆豆腐) that has been toned down and sweetened to appeal to local
tastes. The city’s street food or small snacks (xiao chi 小吃) are enormously rich and varied. Moveable Feasts’ ‘street food encyclopedia’ reflects this culinary hybridity. Alongside the famous soup
dumplings (xiao long bao 小笼包) from the Zhejiang region are roast meat sandwiches (rou jia
mou 肉夹馍) from Shaanxi, lamb skewers (yang rou chuan 羊肉串) from Xinjiang, egg tarts (cha
ye dan 茶叶蛋) from Macau, candied hawthorn (bing tang hu lu 冰糖葫蘆) from the north and
breakfast crepes (jian bing 煎饼) from Shandong. Due to its migrant culture, the tastes from all
over China can be found on the streets of Shanghai.
As a port city, Shanghai has long been transformed by flows of people from around the country, and the world. Each successive wave of immigration sees their food assimilated and synthesized. It began with the initial native Shanghainese who originated mostly from nearby Zhejiang
and Jiangsu Provinces, out of which developed the foods that are considered Shanghai’s signature
dishes. During the treaty port era, Shanghai drew immigrants from new, more far-flung, regions,
who have brought recipes and tastes that subsequently shaped and were shaped by the distinct
Shanghai flavor (Wakeman and Yeh 1992).
Shanghai’s current migrants date from the era of Opening and Reform. Throughout the decades of the planned economy, movement inside the country was largely stopped. In the Socialist
era, both people and food were locked in place by the rigorous enforcement of the hukou system,
which was explicitly designed to regulate population flow, allowing internal migration only when
the state directed it towards key industrial targets (Fan 2008). By controlling the distribution of
work, housing and especially food (through the rationing of grain, oil, meat and vegetables), the
hukou system was extremely effective at locking the population in place. With the growth of the
free market, the hold of the hukou lessened. In its wake came a wave of unprecedented urbanization. Nevertheless, the hukou system, which still ties a variety of social benefits to one’s place of
birth, has remained at the heart of population management in China (Fan 2008; Zhu 2007). In
China, migrants – even those who have lived in the city for decades – ‘float’ between the villages
where their birth is registered and the emerging metropolis, which they help to construct. Bound
327
Anna Greenspan
at once to the city and also to another, often distant, locality, this ‘floating population’ occupies a
precarious in-betweenness that is reshaping the very process of urbanization itself. The hukou system thus reinforces traditional cultural ties to the ancestral home, ensuring that migrants – even
those who have lived in the city for decades – are bound to another, often distant, locality, which
intensifies the already strong regionalism that shapes the city’s culinary culture. This is perhaps
most apparent among the Uighur population who come from the western province of Xinjiang.
Their religious injunction to eat only halal, coupled with a profoundly distinct local food culture,
was further supported – at least until recently – by a relatively permissive policy regarding street
vending among ethnic minorities. The result is that every Friday afternoon around Shanghai’s
main mosques, the Uighur community host Muslim markets, which are among the most popular
and distinctive of Shanghai’s street food events.
The inherent conflict between loyal attachment to a distant native place and pride in a new
identity as Shang hai ren (Shanghai people) has long been the hallmark of the Shanghai sojourner
(Wakeman 1992). This ongoing tension, as Mark Swislocki has noted in his book Culinary Nostalgia, is what defines Shanghai’s food culture. On one side is Ben bang cai, the deeply local cuisine
served in family-style restaurants that is determined by the particular tastes of the Shanghainese.
On the other is the heterogeneity of hai pai cai, which is born instead out of intermixing and
continuous contamination and is productive of the innovation and adaption of a deep culinary
and cultural hybridity. In his book, Swislocki contends that at the heart of the haipaicai–benbangcai
debate is the quintessential Shanghai question: Is it locals or migrants who define the city’s soul
(Swislocki 2009)? The cultural problematic plays itself out through the tastes of the urban street,
whether in the sweet-tasting sauce added to the jian bing, the huge popularity of nighttime barbeque stands or the deep loyalty to pot sticker dumplings (sheng jian bao 生煎包), which some
argue are Shanghai’s only original street food.
The life and culture of the street
According to scholar Samuel Liang, China’s version of the modern street was a product of
Shanghai’s quintessential architecture, the li long with its stone gate (shi ku men 石库门) lanehouses. Traditionally in China, he argues, residential and commercial spaces were strictly
divided. Urban geography was hierarchically constructed, with a physical, psychological and
sociological gap forming a boundary between the more honored, peaceful and protected
‘house mansion-palace centred on the courtyard’ and the more chaotic and crass ‘shop alongthe-street.’ “The courtyard and the street,” writes Liang, “were antithetical spaces separated by
walls: the one represented the elite order and the other the amorphous and vulgar; the one was
the centre and the other always was marginalised in Confucian ideology” (Liang 2008: 491).
The li long, Liang contends, reversed this spatial hierarchy. As the city grew, many lilongs built on
the periphery came to occupy highly valued downtown land. Economic necessity thus ensured
that their outer facade be given over to commercial activity. Shanghai lane-houses were typically bounded by rows of shops, at the back of which was a wall enclosing the residential
area. Rather than try to remove themselves from the busy streets their outer edges produced,
the shi ku men opened themselves to this intrinsic exteriority of the modern city. Instead of
facing inward into the courtyard, the space of traditional domesticity, shi ku men houses had
upper-story windows that looked out onto the street and alleyways. Shanghai’s architecture
thus turned the traditional courtyard house inside-out. In the li longs, everyone could see and
be seen by others, as if the city were one busy street. In Shanghai, then, the walls that had long
closed off the private space of the family weakened, and life inside the home became increasingly integrated with the surrounding streets and shops.
328
Shanghai, street food and the modern metropolis
Critical to these new urban spaces were the myriad micro-businesses that were housed within
the lanes. The li houses, writes Liang were “provisional lodgings centering on business activities.
To pay high rents and sustain an expensive urban life, a house was used not only as a home, but
as a space that facilitated the constant flow of capital” (Liang 2008: 494). Though they were
intended as purely residential then, the li longs were thoroughly ‘mixed use’ from the start, as historian Hanchao Lu details (Lu 1999). In and among the hybrid housing were factories, schools,
traditional Chinese banks, warehouses, bathhouses, fortune tellers, restaurants, law offices, medical
clinics, even government bureaus and Buddhist temples. With the li longs, street food was embedded into the very fabric of Shanghai’s built environment. Streets in residential neighborhoods
were crowded with small stores selling food, clothing and household goods, small ‘proletarian’
restaurants and the ever-popular yan zhi dian tobacco and paper stores that marked the entrance to
practically every lane. There were silk and tea wholesale stores, bookstores and publishing houses.
Inside the alleyways, dozens of hawkers gave life its color and rhythms. The most common and
popular goods were Shanghai’s famous xiao chi (snacks), which “were advertised with a song and
often served from portable kitchens, which street peddlers carried on a pole” (Lu 1999: 209).
When modernization is pitted against street life and street culture, it is not only the livelihood
of vendors that suffers but also the liveliness of the city itself. Indeed, it is precisely the out-ofcontrol vitality that the modernist vision of the future city most strives to contain. Planners
opposition, argues J. Holsten in his work on the modernist city, is directed not at a type of place,
but more critically at a mode of social life that the street engenders. Streets, he notes, create
‘outdoor rooms’ by ‘stealing’ the facades of surrounding buildings. These open spaces – radically
different from a public square – foster “the informal interactions between people, residence, commerce and traffic” upon which the life of the city thrives. The corridor street and the sidewalk,
“the traditional ribbon of exchange,” thus constitutes the architectural context of outdoor public
life that is able to flourish outside the rigidities of the private home and the public institution
(Holston 1999).
“Cities are their streets,” writes Adam Gopnik in his recent review of a new biography of the
great urban anti-planner Jane Jacobs. “Streets are not a city’s veins but its neurology, its accumulated intelligence” (Gopnik 2016). In her canonical book The Death and Life of Great American
Cities, Jacobs presents a view of the city grounded in the material reality of the street. Death and
Life looked to real cities to find what worked. “I shall be writing about how cities work in real life,”
Jacobs states from the start, “because this is the only way to learn what principles of planning and
what practices in rebuilding can promote social and economic vitality in cities, and what practices
and principles will deaden these attributes” (Jacobs 1961: 4). By looking, listening and learning
from the street, Jacobs discovered that the most vibrant urban neighborhoods were precisely those
that the modernists were eagerly clearing away. In the messiness of older urban neighborhoods,
Jacobs saw the successful workings of a complex and diverse system, which assembled itself from
the ground up, and was thus totally at odds with the planners’ desire for perfect control. The dense
and frequent market transactions of the so-called slums were critical to the vibrancy, livability and
even safety of the modern metropolis. In replacing the chaos of the streets with the pristine organization of well-planned high-rises and parks, modern urban planners were, Jacobs maintained,
guilty of a deep anti-urbanism: “anti-city planning,” she called it. Blind to the ‘street dance’ made
from the intimate rhythms of everyday life, the modernists were destroying the productivity and
human interaction so crucial to urban innovation. Their reverence for imposed order was instead
producing vast tracks of desolate spaces empty of life. “This is not the rebuilding of cities,” she
wrote emphatically. “This is the sacking of cities” (Jacobs 1961: 39).
More recently, Sharon Zukin, Philip Kasinitz and Xiangming Chen, in their book Global City,
Local Streets have built on Jacobs’ work by exploring and celebrating local shopping streets as
329
Anna Greenspan
miniature marketplaces that thrive in megacities throughout the world. Local streets, they argue,
function as global urban habitats, spaces where “globalization is embedded in local communities.” They imbue neighborhoods with a special character. A neighborhood’s DNA, they argue,
“is encoded in the ecosystem of the local shopping street” (Zukin et al. 2014: 1). In much of the
world these shopping streets support – as business owners, employees and customers – a culturally
diverse population. They are “spaces of every day diversity” encouraging a “civility amongst
strangers,” which the authors call a “corner shop cosmopolitanism.” Celebrating local shopping
streets for their economic, social and environmental merits, Global City, Local Street views these
grassroots zones as essential to the construction of a human-scale, safe, walkable and bikeable city.
These urban spaces foster a culinary culture that nurtures a particular social engagement.
In addition, and perhaps even more importantly, it is by way of street food that the body most
intensely inserts itself into the urban landscape. With food, the daily rhythms of our embodiment
shape the city streets. Corners and sidewalks that offer the smells, sounds and tastes of cooking
provide pockets of sensuality, which can provoke memory and nostalgia, stimulate visceral feelings of revulsion and disgust, energize with pleasure or satisfy with comfort (Low 2015; Low
2005; Farrer 2017). Food on the street is thus the guarantor of city life.
A growing number of urban theorists are becoming increasingly cognizant of the importance of street life in the twenty-first-century megacity. In part this stems from a realization
that despite the predictive modernist notions, which hold that unplanned markets and itinerant
vendors necessarily ‘evolve’ into a more regulated commercial sector, the informal economy
has persisted in cities around the world, regardless of the level of economic ‘development’
(Mukhija and Loukaitou-Sideris 2014). Whereas many once believed that “street markets and
bazaar culture belong to an unindustrialized, pre-modern identity,” write Bell and LoukaitouSideris, “informal income-generating activities are on the rise in many urban centres around
the world, including in highly developed and urbanized nations” (Bell and Loukaitou-Sideris
2014). In contrast to the idealized, glossy vision of the future city with its sparkling shopping
malls and banners advertising ‘sophisticated and luxury living’ that so many of Shanghai’s
planners and officials advocate, “the ‘post-modern or global city’ as Cross and Karides note, is
characterized by the dual forces of gentrification, on the one hand, and a rise of the informal
sector in which vendors play a vital role on the other. “The small or micro-businesses operated
by street vendors are struggling, to be sure, but they are hardly at the fringe of contemporary
society” (Cross and Karides 2007). Indeed, vending has emerged as a hotly debated issue in
major cities around the world:
Somehow, in the modern global liquid economy, the vendor now figures in the city not
only physically but in the public imagination more than before. Unlike the derision of
vendors in the first historic wave of urbanization at the turn of the 20th century in the
western world (Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht 2009), many cities now highlight
vending as an amenity in the visioning of a vibrant city, like kiosks in a shopping mall,
a “vending urbanism.”
(Bostic, Kim,Valenzuela, 8)
Conclusion: whither Shanghai’s street food?
In Laoximen, amidst the dense network of the old city’s remaining low-rise structures, there is
now a patchwork of vast empty squares. Blocks that just a short time ago held thriving markets
have been plowed over. Shanghai’s battle against the street, which uses the tools of legality,
order, safety, cleanliness and beautification to crack down on vending of all types, rages on.
330
Shanghai, street food and the modern metropolis
Nevertheless, there are some potential inklings that in China too, as Jonathan S. Bell and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris have written, attitudes towards “street vending is at a crossroads” (Bell
and Loukaitou-Sideris 2014: 231). Perhaps there is still a chance that street food can continue
to play a vital role in maintaining the liveliness and livability5 of China’s future cities, Bell and
Loukaitou-Sideris note in trying to make their case that a “number of academic, professional,
and even official voices have called for toleration” (Bell and Loukaitou-Sideris 2014: 239).
These supporters, they write, point to increasing protests against chengguan (the municipal
officials who are tasked with urban management) who are widely criticized for their brutality
(Richardson 2012). Calls for increased toleration draw on the examples of Taipei (Chiu 2013)
and Singapore (Ghani 2011; Henderson et al. 2012) to argue for the cultural value of street
markets, which constitute a “form of living urban heritage worthy of preservation” (Bell &
Loukaitou-Sideris 230).
The strong economic case for street vending also seems to be gaining some traction (Bell
and Loukaitou-Sideris 2014: 231). Faced with an increasing economic downturn and the need
to create jobs, 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. Street food is sometimes included. The much-loved Menghua
wonton shop, whose closure was met with protest, to give one high-profile example, was
allowed to continue its operations in a more formalized outpost due to the intervention of
Premier Li Keqiang, who argued that it should be considered a prime example of the ‘mass
entrepreneurship’ that the state is so eager to promote. Shanghai’s city government has also
recently announced a policy to learn from Taipei and open night markets in several districts of
the city, though what shape these will take has yet to be determined. More interesting still is the
fact that as street life retreats from physical space it resurfaces in cyberspace as apps and social
media link up with the logistic networks of delivery services to remap the landscape of urban
exchange. I learnt of this first from a friend who had set up a successful business selling her
aunt’s rice dumplings (shao mai 烧卖) through a ‘store’ on the immensely popular social media
app WeChat. A more prominent example is the story of Mr. Wu Gencheng, a famous hawker,
who sells the most popular scallion pancakes (cong you bing 葱油饼) in Shanghai. 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, E le ma, helped sponsor Mr Wu’s licensing and relocation.
Li Keqiang also appealed directly on its behalf. Yet another example is A Xin Noodle House
now on Yangdang Lu, which had to relocate to a fancier location when its largely outdoor
stand on Zhaozhou lu was shut down. The many fans of the chef, however, can now ‘friend’
him on WeChat and have his famous crab delivered straight to their door. It seems then that
street food’s long-held traditions and unexpected innovations that arise through the unplanned
hybridity, unpredictable entrepreneurship and creative everyday culture of the street has spread
to a virtual environment. As Moveable Feasts continues its project of deep-mapping the informal megacity, the issue of how street food and street culture are being redrawn in cyberspace
will be one of the main questions it pursues.
Notes
1 I was first introduced to Zhaozhou Lu by Jamie Barys of Untour Shanghai (https://untourfoodtours.
com/).
2 See: www.sh-streetfood.org/features/
3 This formulation comes from food studies Jeffery Pilcher.
4 See: www.sh-streetfood.org/jianbing-an-impact-by-alec-roscoe-and-sam-chen
5 This formulation comes from food studies scholar Krishnendu Ray.
331
Anna Greenspan
Bibliography
Anjaria, J. S. (2016) The Slow Boil: Street Food, Rights and Public Space in Mumbai, Stanford University Press.
Bell, J. S., and A. Loukaitou-Sideris. (2014) ‘Sidewalk Informality: An Examination of Street Vending Regulation in China,’ International Planning Studies 19 (3–4): 221–243, Taylor & Francis.
Bergère, M.-C. (2009) Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity, Stanford University Press.
Berman, M. (1983) All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Verso.
Bhowmik, S. (2005) ‘Street Vendors in Asia: A Review,’ Economic and Political Weekly, May 28: 2256–2264.
Bluestone, D. (1991) ‘Pushcart Evil,’ Journal of Urban History 18 (1). http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/
pdf/10.1177/009614429101800104.
Brown, A. M. B. (2006) Contested Space: Street Trading, Public Space, and Livelihoods in Developing Cities, ITDG
Publishing.
Campanella, T. J. (2012) The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World,
Princeton Architecture Press.
Cardoso, R. D. C. V., M. Companion, and S. R. Marras. (2014) Street Food: Culture, Economy, Health and
Governance, Routledge.
Caro, R. A. (1974) The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Vintage Books.
Chen, M. A. (2005) Rethinking the Informal Economy: Linkages With the Formal Economy and the Formal Regulatory Environment, Oxford Scholarship Online.
Chen S., and A. Roscoe. (2015) ‘Jianbing: The Food, the Village and the People’ Moveable Feast (Student
Features).
Chiu, C. (2013) ‘Informal Management, Interactive Performance: Street Vendors and Police in a Taipei
Night Market,’ International Development Planning 35 (4): 335–352.
Corbusier, L. (1987) The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning, Dover.
Cosgrove, D. (1999) Mappings, Reaktion Books.
Cross, J, and M. Karides. (2007) ‘Capitalism, Modernity, and The Appropriate Use of Space,’ in Street Entrepeneurs: People, Place and Politics, Routledge.
Dikötter, F. (2016) The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976, Bloomsberry.
Fan, C. C. (2008) China on the Move: Migration, the State, and the Household, Routledge.
Farrer, J. (2017) ‘Urban Foodways: A Research Agenda,’ in A Research Agenda for Cities, Elgar Research
Agendas.
Fishman, R. (1987) Bourgeois Utopias : The Rise and Fall of Suburbia, Basic Books.
Ghani, A. (2011) ‘A Recipe for Success: How Singapore Hawker Centres Came to Be,’ IPS Update, May.
Gopnik, A. (2016) ‘Jane Jacob’s Street Smarts,’ New Yorker, September 26.
Greenspan, A. (2014) Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade, Oxford University Press.
Hansen, K. T., W. E. Little, and B. L. Milgram. (2013) Street Economies in the Urban Global South, School for
Advanced Research Press.
Hart, K. (1973) ‘Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana,’ The Journal of Modern
African Studies 11 (1): 61–89.
Henderson, J. C., O. S. Yun, P. Poon, and X. Biwei. (2012) ‘Hawker Centres as Tourist Attractions: The Case
of Singapore,’ International Journal of Hospitality Management 31 (3): 849–855. Elsevier Ltd.
Holston, J. (1989) The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília, University of Chicago Press.
Holston, J. (1999) ‘The Modernist City and the Death of the Street,’ in Theorizing the City: The New Urban
Anthropology Reader, 245–276. Rutgers University Press.
Huang, P. C. C. (2009) ‘China’s Neglected Informal Economy: Reality and Theory,’ Modern China 35 (4):
405–438.
Huang, Y. (2008) Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State, Cambridge University
Press.
Jacobs, J. (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Vintage.
Khanna, P. (2010) ‘Beyond City Limits,’ Foreign Policy, August.
Kim, A. M. (2015) Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City, University of Chicago.
Liang, S. Y. (2008) ‘Where the courtyard meets the street: Spatial culture of the li neighborhoods,’ Shanghai,
1870–1900,’ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 67 (4): 482–503.
Loukaitou-Sideris, A., and R. Ehrenfeucht. (2009). Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation Over Public Space. MIT
Press.
Low, K. E. Y. (2005) Scents and Scent-Sibilities, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Low, K. E. Y. (2015) ‘The Sensuous City: Sensory Methodologies in Urban Ethnographic Research,’ Ethnography 16 (3): 295–312.
332
Shanghai, street food and the modern metropolis
Lu, H. (1999) Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century, University of California Press.
McKinsey & Co. (2009) ‘Preparing for China’s Urban Billion,’ McKinsey Global Institute, March: 1–540.
McNeill, W. (2007) ‘Cities and Their Consequences,’ The American Interest 2 (4): 5–12.
Mukhija, V., and A. Loukaitou-Sideris. (2014) The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor,
MIT Press.
Neuwirth, R. (2012) Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, Anchor Books.
Olds, K. (1997) ‘Globalizing Shanghai: The “Global Intelligence Corps” and the Building of Pudong,’ Cities
14 (2): 109–123.
Portes, A. C., M. Benton, and A. Lauren. (1989) The Informal Economy Studies in Advanced and Less Developed
Countries, John Hopkins University.
Rajagopal, A. (2004) ‘The Menace of Hawkers: Property Forms and the Politics of Market Liberalization in
Mumbai,’ in Property in Question:Value Transformation in the Global Market, Bloomsburry.
Richardson, S. (2012) Beat Him, Take Everything Away: Abuses by China’s Chengguan Para-Police, Human
Rights Watch.
Roy, A. (2005) ‘Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning,’ Journal of the American Planning
Association 71 (2): 147–158.
Roy, A. (2009) ‘The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory,’ Regional Studies 43 (6).
Saunders, D. (2010) Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World, Pantheon Books.
Solinger, D. J. (2013) ‘Streets as Suspect,’ Critical Asian Studies 45 (1): 3–26.
Soto, H. D. (2002) The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism, Basic Books.
Swislocki, M. (2009) Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban Experience in Shanghai, Stanford
University Press.
Wakeman, F., and W.-H. Yeh. (1992) Shanghai Sojourners, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of
California.
Wang, D. (2013) Street Culture in Chengdu: Public Space, Urban Commoners, and Local Politics, 1870–1930,
Stanford University Press.
Wasserstrom, J. N. (2008) Global Shanghai, 1850–2010: A History in Fragments, Routledge.
Zhu,Y. (2007) ‘China’s Floating Population and Their Settlement Intention in the Cities: Beyond the Hukou
Reform,’ Habitat International 31 (1): 65–76.
Zukin, S., P. Kasinitz, and X. Chen. (2015). Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York
to Shanghai. Routledge.
Zwingle, E., and S. Franklin. (2002) ‘Megacities: By 2030, ‘Two Out of Three People Will Live in an Urban
World, With Most of the Explosive Growth Occurring in Developing Countries,’ National Geographic.
333