Living in the Margins in Mainland China, Hong Kong and India

Wing Chung Ho, Florence Padovani, Wing Chung Ho, Florence Padovani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367511128
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000079289
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Social Sciences

With a range of case studies from Asia, this book sheds light on empirical realizations of marginality in a globalized context using first-hand original research.

In the late 2000s, the financial crisis witnessed the fragility of high levels of market integration and the vulnerability of globalisation. Since then, the world seems to have entered an epoch of anxiety featuring populism with varying degrees of protectionism and nationalism. What is the nature of this populist mood as a backlash against globalisation? How do people feel about it and act upon it? Why should specific intellectual attention be paid to the increasingly marginalised by the recent macroscopic structural changes? These are the questions addressed by the contributors of this book, illustrated with specific cases from mainland China, Hong Kong and India, all of which have undergone substantial populist or nationalist movements since 2010.

A valuable resource for sociologists looking to understand the impacts of globalization, especially those with a particular interest in Asia.

Part I
Margins in Mainland China

The rural-urban interface

1 Home for fewer people

The demolishment of a farmers’ market and its long-term effect on the lower-skilled population in Beijing

Yulin Chen, Fei Yan, Yue Yang and Hengyu Liu

Introduction

With the rapid development of mega-cities in China, “urban diseases” such as traffic congestion, environmental degradation and high housing prices are becoming more and more prominent, and strict control of population size has become a core issue of urban governance in mega-cities. In recent years, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou have taken harsh population control measures such as administrative prohibition, industrial replacement and space diversion to control the inflows of people and force out the so-called lower-skilled population. In Beijing, 100 commodity trading markets were dismantled and moved throughout 2014, and 57 were in 2015. An operating area of 948,000 m² were involved, and the number of rental stalls were reduced by 21,000 m² (Beijing Bureau of Statistics 2016). According to the official urban planning policy, Beijing aims to become a world-class city cluster, and therefore “a decline in urban population growth means fewer traffic jams, less pressure on the housing and public service sectors, and a decrease in urban scale and resource use, which are necessary for sustainable development” (China Daily 2018).

Previous research on the spatial governance of floating and lower-skilled populations in mega-cities in China mainly focused on two major themes. The first theme adopts an elite perspective to examine the effect of government efforts to control the population. The scholarly emphasis in this line has shifted from “whether to expulse the population” to “how to effectively expulse the population”. In order to turn mega-cities such as Beijing and Shanghai into global cities, scholars propose specific urban promotion measures such as strengthening household registration management and restrictions, setting minimum standards for rental housing, eliminating low-end industries and business patterns, and adjusting urban spatial patterns to expel the population as the main goal of enhancing a city’s global competitiveness (Anttiroiko 2015; Gu et al. 2015; Liu 2015; Yang et al. 2015; Björner 2017).

The second theme adopts a grassroots perspective to investigate the social impact of urban redevelopment on the migrant population and their social integration. Based on empirical studies on urban villages in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, scholars found that the mass demolition in the process of urban redevelopment will have an immediate impact on the floating population’s residence, social relations network and the original informal economic system, forcing them to move to the surrounding or more distant villages in the city (Xiang 2005; Wu et al. 2013; Zhao et al. 2017; Yan 2018; Chen & Liu 2019). However, there is still a lack of in-depth empirical studies and microscopic evidence on the long-term effect of spatial governance and urban upgrading policies on those who live at the margins in mega-cities in China.

To fill this research gap, this research conducted a survey of re-employment status of vendors after the demolition of a farmers’ market in Beijing – a typical physical space of the floating and lower-skilled population in mega-cities (Morales 2009, 2011). Essentially, farmers’ markets are among the most vulnerable and jeopardized clustering spaces for the floating population and therefore become the main target of industrial disintegration (Chen 2017). In many Chinese cities in recent years, many farmers’ markets have been replaced by large, modern supermarkets due to the former’s small-scale, low-technologies, safety hazards and disordered environments (Goldman et al. 1999; Hu et al. 2004; Zhang & Pan 2013). In particular in Beijing, since 2006, the Beijing municipal government started to strictly regulate the development of farmers’ markets – markets inside the second ring road were banned from further development and could only be converted to other retail forms or relocated outward; new market construction was prohibited within the fourth ring road (Beijing Municipal Commission of Commerce 2006). These regulations further accelerated the demolition of farmers’ markets in the city and subsequently had disruptive effects on life trajectories and social integration of self-employed vendors who once worked in the markets.

Meanwhile, the farmers’ market is not only the gathering place of the floating population but also the provider of basic services and urban public space of local residents. Previous studies have found that farmers’ markets provide a distinctive public platform to build migrant-resident social ties and mutual trust (Yue et al. 2013; Chen 2017). While self-employed migrant vendors can have access to diverse local customers every day to build connections with mainstream society, local residents can also provide migrants with emotional support and information sharing beyond the boundaries of the shopping place. Along this line, this chapter will also investigate the changes in the behavior of the residents of the surrounding communities before and after the demolishment of a farmers’ market, so as to fully demonstrate the impact of spatial governance on the floating population as well as local residents in Beijing.

In order to make a comprehensive evaluation of the implementation effect of spatial control measures, we investigated the responses of the floating population in the context of Beijing’s industry upgrading and population control policies and trace their self-employment trajectories. We found that most of the migrant vendors became self-employed again in the newly built vegetable markets not far away from the original market instead of leaving Beijing. Though vendors chose to proactively search for new employment by themselves, the demolition still had enduring disruptive effects on their life trajectories and social integration in the host city. At the same time, the demolition of the farmers’ market and population control policy also had a negative impact on local residents’ daily life. We found that local residents frequently reported that the vegetables sold in supermarkets and vegetable stalls were much less fresh and less diverse compared to those sold in large farmers’ markets. In other words, the demand of local residents and the attachment of migrant vendors to farmers’ markets still persist during the urban redevelopment and beautification period.

Data and methodology

The case investigated in this chapter – Sun Palace Farmers’ Market – was located between the third and fourth ring roads in the northeast of Chaoyang District, Beijing (Figure 1.1). Sun Palace Farmers’ Market was at the intersection of Sun Palace Middle Road and Sun Palace South Street, close to Metro Line 10 “Sun Palace Station” and bus station “Xia’s Home”, covering an area of about 45,000 m², with more than 1,000 vendors. It used to be the largest farmers’ market between the third and fourth ring roads in northeastern Beijing. The service radius covered areas such as the Sun Palace, Wangjing and Shao Yaoju. On October 16, 2013, Sun Palace Farmers’ Market was forced to be demolished in light of Beijing’s population size regulation and non-capital function relief policy. There have been many similar markets that were forced to close in recent years, as the municipal government implemented an exclusive policy to remove l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: why use the concept of marginality today?
• Part I Margins in Mainland China: the rural-urban interface
• Part II Margins in Mainland China: Shanghai
• Part III Margins in Hong Kong
• Part IV Margins in India
• Index