WP4 Rough Draft
Street vendors have been a very popular form of trade in China for many decades. Walking along the street of my hometown Zhengzhou, those street vendors could always remind me of my childhood. In fact, for most Chinese people, street vendors are an important component of their memory of the city. However, street vendors are not always so welcomed by the public. People’s perspectives have diverged from the benefits and problems of street vendors and their problems of regulation. With the debate keeping ongoing, a deeper economic problem reveals and demands more comprehensive consideration.
The ongoing debate about whether to keep street vendors or ban them has been discussed heatedly by Chinese people since it’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, many citizens favor the street-stall economy for its various benefits. One of the most obvious benefits is how street-stall business solves the serious unemployed problem. The rural unemployed move to cities to find employment due to the economic changes. They have low educational background and skills, which makes it impossible to find jobs in big companies. “Entry into this trade is easier because it doesn’t require high skills and the capital involved is low.” (Bhowmik) Also, after the monetary crisis such as the impact of Covid 19, many companies broke down and employment became more strained. Both two factors make more people involved in street vending recently. It became an important way for those people to make a living and support their families. For example, street vendor Wu Jianjiang, with his 80-year-old sick mother and a 16-year-old child in depression, needs nearly six thousand Yuan for medicines every month. Through setting up stalls at night, an extra 200 Yuan could be earned each day to help relieve his family pressure. (坤) On the other hand, people who opposite the existence of street stalls point to the problems it brings to society. The absence of business licenses brings fake and low-quality products to the market and is harming the rights of consumers. For food selling among street vendors, the problem is more obvious since lots of them “have limited knowledge about food safety”. The education level and knowledge sharing of the vendors are so low that they are unconscious of the food safety laws and regulations. Their small investments also lower the quality of food. (Song) The disordered booths occupied traffic roads, leading to traffic jams and accidents. In other words, the freedom street-stall business has is so excessive that vendors abuse their freedom, leading to a messy environment that takes up traffic space. In other words, while the economy is in the trend of getting more formal, street stalls, bringing disorder to many aspects, have decelerated the process. According to the above, the debate of street vendors separates people through their personal profits, whether to fill the shortage of life-supporting income or to have more convenience after self-sufficient. The debate sometimes leads to fighting and even more serious criminals. People may ask why the Chinese government hasn’t done anything to deal with this livelihood issue. In fact, the Chinese government has promulgated several regulations to balance both the two sides’ profits even since twenty years ago.
In 1992, the State Council promulgated The Regulations on the Management of City Appearance and Environmental Sanitation, which specifically lists the behaviors and punishment measures that affect the urban appearance and environmental sanitation. (法学会) And recently, in 2017, the Standing Committee of Henan Provincial People’s Congress promulgated the Regulations of Henan Province on the Administration of Small Food Workshops, Small Shops, and Small Stalls. The regulation requires the street vendors to meet detailed stipulations about standard production procedures and environment, management of trading places and time for vendors, and even the garbage disposal plans. Corresponding punishments are also listed specifically. For example, stalls that use water that does not meet the national standards for the hygiene of living and drinking water shall have the food and raw materials that do not meet the standards and requirements of food safety confiscated and be imposed a fine of between not less than 500 yuan and not more than 5,000 yuan. (“河南省食品小作坊、小经营店和小摊点管理条例_政策法规_河南省市场监督管理局”) The latest regulation covers solutions to almost every problem indicated by the opponents, but they aren’t enough to solve the problem. So why is the small street vendor such a huge problem for the country?
One of the reasons could be that the Chinese regulations are simply not efficient to be used to cover all street stalls and restrict their behaviors. The administration of Bangkok produces the order of street-stall business by setting a parallel set of rules according to its own condition. Soi Rangnam is well-known for filling with street vendors the whole day. According to Mr. Quentin Batréau, the high density of vendors in this limited area “creates conflicts over space allocation and over priorities in law enforcement.” (Batréau, and Bonnet) The district administration first enforced Thai law on the vendors, but there are slightly any positive effects. One of the problems is that most of the vendors in Soi Rangnam didn’t have the status of legal vendors and weren’t respecting the law. (Batréau, and Bonnet) So that’s when the district administration set up a parallel set of rules. The district administration devised a special category that belongs to vendors that are illegal but tolerated. Mr.Batréau says, “This category is a regulatory innovation that allows the district administration to mask the illegal nature of certain vendors and distinguish them from truly illegal vendors who are not only breaking the law but also the administration’s own rules.” (Batréau, and Bonnet) In this way, the district administration is adjusting its measures to local conditions to better regulate the vendors.
What I mean here is not that Chinese vendors are not having the status of legal vendors, like those in Soi Rangnam, to meet China’s regulations. On the other hand, I am trying to say that Bangkok’s example is providing people with an insight to think about the loopholes in China’s general regulations of street vendors. It is said in the Regulations of Henan Province on the Administration of Small Food Workshops, Small Shops, and Small Stalls that “Small workshops, small business shops, and stalls shall check the licenses, registration certificates, record cards or product qualification certificates of the suppliers when purchasing food raw materials, food additives, and food-related products.”(“河南省食品小作坊、小经营店和小摊点管理条例_政策法规_河南省市场监督管理局”) But in some less developed areas where people are unfamiliar with the laws because there is no unified information registration process, consumers have no way of knowing the commodity’s information and identify the responsibilities after accidents happening. And street vendors are lacking legal awareness that they don’t provide receipts and invoices, which a standard trade should do. (Huang, and Chen) Without receipts and invoices, it’s even harder for consumers and administration officers to check the licenses or examine the product qualification certificates. And in the latter part of the regulation, there are no countermeasures to deal with this actual situation. Referring back to Bangkok’s case, the district administration might need to look at the extent of their conditions and make adjustments to the more general regulations in this aspect. But could changing the regulations solve the entire problem?
The answer seems to be no. When we think about the problem of street vendors, we are actually thinking about the problem of the informal economy, which couldn’t be solved by simple regulations. The Chinese government has never legalized street-stall business and thus hardly protects their profits. The regulations of street stalls in China talk about what they shouldn’t do in order to fill the need of the opponents, but never what the society should do to benefits the vendors. Since the informal economy “is the diversified set of economic activities, enterprises, jobs, and workers that are not regulated or protected by the state.”(“Informal Economy | WIEGO”), street vendors could be seen as one of the many components of the informal economy. Many Chinese people fall into the informal employees. According to Zhongguo Tongji Nianjian, China has approximately 100 million unregistered urban informal employees. The unsecured jobs of this group of people include “domestics, home-based workers (like seamstresses and laundresses), deliver boys/girls, apprentices, street vendors and the like.”(Huang) Considering the fact that “the growth of informal economies is driven by multiple forces that cannot be fully explained by one single theory”(Huang et al), people might think that the problem of the fate of street stalls is impossible to solve because of its complex origin. However, a look outside China to the world could provide us with a new way to see the issue.
Singapore has nearly 50,000 street vendors nowadays and it’s “the only country in the world where all street vendors are licensed”. The Hawkers’ Department makes sure there are no unlicensed vendors and actively issues licenses to those in need. To help the vendors maintain the environment clean and avoid inconvenience to pedestrians, they ensure vendors that they are familiar with the Environmental Public Health act of 1968. “They also organise regular training courses on food and personal hygiene, and nutrition. Between 1990 and 1996 the department had trained more than 10,000 hawkers.” The Department enables the vendors to “have proper stalls and maintain proper hygiene”. The city planners realized the contributions street stalls bring to the society, including making the cost of living down as “workers, students and the poorer sections depend on them for their daily necessities…” To sum up, the Singapore government has considered the profits of vendors while regulating them to be more formal. Compared to its neighbor, the Chinese government has hardly confirmed the contribution of the informal economy officially. Like many other countries, the government are indifferent to the circumstances of those individuals and not protecting them. (Bhowmik) Their regulations on street stalls are mainly focusing on restraining the vendors rather than protecting them. The reason for such neglect is hidden in its neglect of the informal economy as a whole. What Chinese city managers could learn from Singapore is to recognize the important meaning of the people in the informal economy and protects their right through regulations and actual actions. They should stop only restricting the vendors while neglecting their own profits. After all, the informal economy mostly consists of people from the marginalized economy. The street stalls are the only choice for their live-supporting. The government should see their predicament and manage to help them. To help people from the informal economy is in some way helping the whole economy to become more diverse.
The street-stall regulation in Bangkok and Singapore might just be a start for us to reflect on adjusting China’s general regulation to be more specified for certain places and more inclusive to face the informal economy which takes up a huge portion of the present Chinese economy. Being in line with local conditions could always help the government solve their social problems. An informal economy could be as important as other forms of economy in the development of a country. The small street stalls lead to a bigger question of the economy that the Chinese government should consider comprehensively and learn from other countries to find references for China’s own possible solution.
Work cited:
1.Sharit K. Bhowmik. “Street Vendors in Asia: A Review.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 40, no. 22/23, 2005, pp. 2256–2264. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4416705. Accessed 23 Apr. 2021.
2.陈坤. “激活‘地摊经济’，让城市烟火气温暖大众心.” 人民论坛网, 张迪, 4 June 2020, www.rmlt.com.cn/2020/0604/582542.shtml.
3.Song, Shangcong. “Street Stall Economy in China in the Post-COVID-19 Era: Dilemmas and Regulatory Suggestions.” Research in Globalization, Elsevier, 5 Nov. 2020, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590051X20300198.
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5.”河南省食品小作坊、小经营店和小摊点管理条例_政策法规_河南省市场监督管理局”. Scjg.Henan.Gov.Cn, 2020, http://scjg.henan.gov.cn/2020/01-14/1248794.html.
6.”Informal Economy | WIEGO”. Wiego.Org, 2021, https://www.wiego.org/informal-economy.
7.Huang, Philip C. C. “China’s Neglected Informal Economy: Reality and Theory.” Modern China, vol. 35, no. 4, 2009, pp. 405–438. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27746927. Accessed 23 Apr. 2021.
8.Huang, Gengzhi et al. Integrating Theories On Informal Economies: An Examination Of Causes Of Urban Informal Economies In China. MDPI, 2020, Accessed 23 Apr 2021.
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10.Batréau, Quentin, and Francois Bonnet. “Managed Informality: Regulating Street Vendors In Bangkok”. City & Community, vol 15, no. 1, 2016, pp. 29–43. SAGE Publications, doi:10.1111/cico.12150. Accessed 5 Apr 2021.
