Beyond unemployment: Informal employment and heterogeneous motivations for participating in street vending in present-day China
基于广州200份摊贩访谈，揭示当代中国街头摊贩并非仅因失业，而是由失业、低质工作、农村贫困、正规经营困难及追求自主性等多元动机驱动，是劳动者应对社会经济转型的策略。
The proliferation of urban street vending in developing countries is generally viewed as being as a result of unemployment. Using a theoretical approach based on mainstream perspectives on informal employment and first-hand material from 200 semi-structured vendor interviews in Guangzhou, we challenge this view by revealing the heterogeneity of people’s motivations for participating in street vending in present-day China. Various types of labourers, including wage workers, farmers, the unemployed and small businesspeople, participate in street vending with diverse motivations, but in a common attempt to improve their livelihoods. Such motivations are driven both by the labourers’ responses to multiple socio-economic forces including unemployment, the low quality of waged jobs, rural poverty, the difficulties of maintaining a formal business and the poor remuneration of jobs in cities, and by their desire to achieve autonomy and flexibility. Street vending is mainly argued to be an effective strategy of ordinary labourers to cope with the unfavourable situations they face amidst socio-economic transformation. It should not be seen as a problem, but a potential part of the solution to the problems arising from socio-economic transformation in post-reform China.