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Abstract
Shanghai’s officials and urban planners often equate development with “cleaning up the streets.” The snacks (xiao chi 小吃) that are sold from the small shops and mobile stands—dumplings steamed in wooden baskets, nighttime barbeques, carts selling stir-fried noodles—are seen to belong to a past that must be overcome. This paper reflects on the changing fate of Shanghai’s street food in order to analyze tensions between a regulated, formal commercial sector and a much more anarchic informal economy as it plays out in the making of the future city. It argues that the informal is not simply a temporary phenomenon, and that the evolutionary conception of economic growth in which a “backward” black market progresses to a more “advanced” formal sphere masks a deep (and sometimes violent) struggle. Shanghai’s importance as a model for twenty-first century urbanism rests not only on its high-speed trains and super-tall skyscrapers, but also, just as vitally, on its street food, street markets and street life.
Acknowledgements
This paper was written with the help of the “City Food” project, headed by Dr. Krishnendu Ray, as well as the students in the author’s street food class at NYU Shanghai and all the collaborators involved in Moveable Feasts.
Notes
1. Courtesan culture, as many scholars have documented, played a critical role in the making of modern Shanghai. See, for example, Yeh, Catherine Vance. Shanghai love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910. University of Washington Press; Braudel, Fernand, The Perspective of the World: Civilization & Capitalism 15th-Eighteenth Century. Harper & Row 1984; Lee, Leo Ou-fan. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945. Harvard University Press, 1999; Liang, Samuel Y. “Mapping Modernity in Shanghai: Space, Gender, and Visual Culture in the Sojourners” City 1853–98.” Sojourners 1853: 98, 2010.
2. Other “civilization campaigns” implemented in the lead-up to the Shanghai Expo targeted the local habits of hanging laundry outside and the wearing of pajamas out of doors.
4. In an article in the LA Times, consultant and educator Randy Pollock tells a familiar story that lays bare the unimaginative repetition displayed by his class of middle managers. His article centers on a group of Chinese MBA students whom he challenged to “brainstorm two-hour business plans. I divided them into six groups, gave them detailed instructions and an example: a restaurant chain. The more original their idea, the better, I stressed—and we’d vote for a prize winner…. In the end, five of the six groups presented plans for, you guessed it, restaurant chains. The sixth proposed a catering service” (Pollock Citation2009). For China to break its students out of this mold and do a better job of teaching risk-taking originality, he suggests, people should pay heed to the baozi stand and jianbing sellers run by the cities’ newcomers. China, he concludes, needs to “harness the same inventive energy of the street markets and small-time entrepreneurs and put it in the schools” (Pollock Citation2009).
5. The full text is available here: http://www.ccru.net/archive/markets.htm.
6. I am grateful to Jeffrey Wasserstrom for pointing out these passages by Janet Y Chen. Personal communication, February 2016.
7. Thanks to Alfonso Morales for this reference.
12. Food safety is an enormously important issue in China. Its impact on debates over street food is beyond the scope of this paper.
13. https://medium.com/@anita.bonomi/li-fei-street-food-vending-in-shanghai-a30995c432e4#.fe4sp4twt.
15. For more on shanzhai see Anna Greenspan, Silvia Lindtner and David Li. “Designed in Shenzhen: Shanzhai Manufacturing and Maker Entrepreneurs.” Aarhus Conference on Critical Alternatives, 2015; Anna Greenspan, Silvia Lindtner and David Li. “Shanzhai: China’s Collaborative Electronics Design System.” Atlantic, May 18, 2014. Bobbie Johnson. Shanzhai! Wired, July 12, 2010; Sky Canaves and Juliet Ye. “Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Rebellion in China.” Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2009; Josephine Ho. “Shanzhai: Economic/Cultural Production through the Cracks of Globalization.” Crossroads Plenary Speech, 2010.