Anomie and Crime: The Logic of Street Vendors’ Adaptation After a Crackdown Campaign in Guangzhou, China.

• In Event: Crime and Violence in Context

Abstract

With three years ethnography work in Guangzhou, this research traces life stories of eight street vendors and examines how a city-wide campaign to crack down on street vending affects their works and lives. We find that while the campaign has no effect on some powerful and well-connected local vendors, it pushes some to even more marginal status and still others to illegal and criminal economy. We further explore factors affecting different vendors’ choices after the crackdown campaign, and examine how different choices are shaped by differential social, economic and cultural capital owned by street vendors. This research contributes to a better understanding of significance of informal economy and how a criminogenic situation is formed in China.

Authors

• Anli Jiang, University of Macau

• Jianhua Xu, University of Macau