Rural Migrants in the Informal Economy of Urbanising China: Violence and Whitewashed Government Legitimacy

This article situates the informal economic sector in a wider context of post-socialist urban transformation where predatory behaviour toward migrant petty entrepreneurs has been rife. In the limited urban market spaces that are made available to petty migrant vendors, political exclusion and scant state supervision is the norm. Thuggish local residents have stepped in to shake down and expropriate part of the incomes of the migrants. These non-state actors largely fall into the categories of “Black and Evil” listed in Xi Jinping’s campaign to crack down on crime and bolster state legitimacy. Drawing on ethnographic evidence from long-term onsite fieldwork at an outdoor urban marketplace occupied by the stalls of petty vendors, this article shows that such legitimation can only be paper-thin.