THE INFORMAL CONSTITUTION OF STATE CENTRALITY: Governing Street Businesses in (Post‐)Pandemic Chengdu, China

Yi Jin and Yimin Zhao

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2022, vol. 46, issue 4, 631-650

Abstract: As part of China's endeavour to modernize and internationalize its cities, it has repeatedly eliminated street markets and street vendors. But in the (post‐)pandemic context, regulating street businesses inclusively turned out to be an efficient way to generate jobs that has been widely promoted. This turn reveals a new pattern in China's urban governance that might contribute to rethinking the state–informality nexus. In this article we draw on observations and interviews in Chengdu and on critical discourse analyses of related government documents and news reports to suggest that there is an underlying logic of control that governs the state's new tactics for regulating street businesses. We examine three tactics—performative tactics of regulation, spatial tactics of control and temporal tactics of contingency—to uncover the state's centrality and the tactics it uses to consolidate such centrality in the name of informality. Regarding informality and state centrality as conditions for each other allows us to interrogate both the internal logic of control and its manifestations in everyday statehood. Within the informal constitution of state centrality, everyday negotiations and contestations of spatial claims eventually render the ‘ordinary state’ a hegemonic locus that shapes urban experiences and politics.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13124

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:46:y:2022:i:4:p:631-650

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0309-1317

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research is currently edited by Alan Harding, Roger Keil and Jeremy Seekings

More articles in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().