Governing street vendors, assembling differentiated Chinese statehood: The case of Guanting Street, Hefei

This paper investigates the everyday production of the local state through street vending governance in an informal food market on Guanting Street, Hefei, China. By studying how three state and quasi-state institutions jointly govern street vendors on Guanting Street, we argue that existing literature, which explains street vending governance through state fragmentation or ambivalence, does not sufficiently capture how dispersed and fragmented institutions relate to one another in practice. We observe and analyze the mechanisms in use and conclude by advancing the idea of differentiated statehood to explain governance of street vendors on Guanting Street. The analysis further demonstrates a key political effect of differentiated statehood: the production of a state that effectively manages the street yet forecloses collective negotiation. While rooted in a contemporary Chinese city and within debates on Chinese governance, the paper contributes more broadly to debates on governance of urban informality and everyday state formation.