Street stalls saved Guangzhou in 2020; then what?

One evening in June 2020, not long after Guangzhou had emerged from its first COVID lockdown, I stepped outside my apartment. The alleyway that had been quiet for months was alive again. Fried noodles, grilled oysters, sweet soups. A dozen or so street stalls lined the pavement. Around that time, my social media feed was filled with talk of the “street-stall economy”.

Behind this scene was a clear policy shift. In the first quarter of 2020, Guangzhou’s GDP contracted 6.8 per cent year on year. The urban surveyed unemployment rate climbed to a record high. Faced with immense employment pressure, the central government announced in June 2020 that mobile street vendors would no longer be penalised. Guangzhou acted swiftly. Districts began designating temporary vending zones. According to the Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Statistics, the number of newly registered individual businesses jumped by more than 30 per cent in the second half of 2020. A substantial portion were street vendors. The street-stall economy had become the city’s most important employment buffer.

And as a buffer, it worked. Guangzhou added over 250,000 new urban jobs in 2020, surpassing its annual target. But what mattered more was the employment that could not be easily counted. A single fried-noodle stall might support an entire family. A study by Sun Yat-sen University found that the number of mobile vendors in Guangzhou grew by nearly 50 per cent in the second half of 2020. More than 60 per cent were migrant workers who had lost their previous jobs during the pandemic. The street-stall economy was not just about restoring the city’s vibrancy. It was functioning as a genuine safety net.

But the cracks soon began to show. From 2021 onward, the period of “inclusive tolerance” for street stalls gradually came to an end. Temporary vending zones were dismantled. Vendors found themselves once again caught in a cat-and-mouse game with enforcement. More fundamentally, the temporary nature of the street-stall “solution” meant it offered vendors no long-term security. There was no social insurance, no stable place to operate, no policy support. The brief heyday of street vending exposed a deeper problem: a blind spot in China’s employment safety net. A fried-noodle stall can ease a family’s immediate hardship, but it should not be the only lifeline for the unemployed.