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Harmony on the streets where we live

By Alexis Hooi (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-12 07:52

Fruit and vegetables fresh off the farms, pet fish shimmering in glass bowls and knockoff novels that make up the latest bestseller lists - these are some of the wide range of goods that can be found on the carts of peddlers just outside my apartment.

Like many other Beijing residents, I enjoy the rock-bottom prices offered by these vendors and do a fair bit of roadside shopping myself.

The bustle on the streets also means that the unlicensed peddlers are a problem for the city authorities that will not be going away anytime soon.

Just last month, local media reported two separate cases in Shenzhen where street peddlers attacked the urban management officers, known as chengguan, shortly after the hawkers were chased off the streets. The food peddler in one of the cases even knifed and killed a chengguan.

City authorities often cite poor hygiene, traffic disruption, unsightliness, unfair pricing and questionable quality as some of the reasons why the unlicensed peddlers need to be banned from the streets.

It is common to see peddlers scampering from their chosen spots of business once they detect the chengguan or vice versa, but the recent discovery of an online list explicitly teaching the officers how to deal with their quarry with minimal bloodletting and bruising further exposed the severity of the situation.

It is also easy to understand how the chengguan can become frustrated and prone to violence toward the peddlers, as much as how the hawkers get upset when their business is disrupted or their wares are confiscated to deprive them of a livelihood.

A number of local authorities are finding it important to deal with the situation in a humane manner.

Officials in Changsha, the provincial capital of Hunan, said they have been distributing the perishable agricultural produce collected from unlicensed street vendors to needy residents and charities.

The authorities there also post the records of items they have seized from the vendors on a notice board for public viewing. Non-agricultural products are reportedly auctioned off and nothing is kept by the local government.

Similarly, at a conference in Guangzhou earlier this month to address the issue of unlicensed street peddlers, leading Chinese economist Li Yining said a more tolerant attitude should be shown toward the vendors because they have a hard time finding work as it is.

To that effect, there have been suggestions calling for designated areas in cities where vendors can ply their wares. This would help minimize traffic disruptions, enable better control of product hygiene and quality, and prevent the peddlers from "blemishing" order on the city streets.

One online user has even suggested that the peddlers be left to their own devices, because when you take a close look at the famous Song Dynasty scroll, Along the River During the Qingming Festival, you will see that street vendors in the 12th century already made up the vibrant social scene in the Chinese imperial capital of Kaifeng.

In an online parody of the artwork, the peddlers during that time are depicted as having fled from the approaching "chengguan" and, therefore, digitally removed from the painting - leaving the streets totally empty.

E-mail: alexishooi@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/12/2009 page6)