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Conflicts between urban street vendors and city regulators have become a common urban sight in Chinese cities today. This paper considers how visions of modern urban streets and sidewalks have helped to generate increasingly restrictive policies on street vending and spurred new forms of urban regulation and policing. While mostly an everyday routine of Chinese city life, the resulting vendor–chengguan conflicts dramatize state power in public and carry the latent danger of crowd violence in response. In particular, aggressive policing of highly visible city streets can at times produce a volatile “politics of the street” involving episodes of vendor resistance and even dramatic expressions of bystander solidarity which challenge these street-level expressions of state power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that the low-income housing programme in China has so far failed to provide adequate housing for the poor for three main reasons: the central government's failure to define a clear mission; a lack of commitment from local governments; and an exclusionary policy towards migrants. A systematic review of low-income housing policy in China shows that the central government juggles its economic and socio-political goals thereby causing constant changes in low-income housing policy. Meanwhile, the existing public finance system, the performance evaluation system and localization in policy implementation have all resulted in a lack of commitment from local governments to low-income housing. Inadequate provision is made worse by problems with allocation. Despite encouraging changes since 2010, many factors underlying the government's failures remain unchanged, thus the fate of low-income housing remains uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]