In order to boost the pandemic-stricken economy and prop up employment statistics, China has officially retracted an almost decade-long cityscape cleaning effort, and rebooted the street vendors in a new nation-wide initiative known as "street stall economy"(地摊经济), allowing residents across the country to set up open-air shops on the sidewalks or other available public spaces, with no repercussion from the "Chengguans", or city inspectors for causing pollution.

China's Premier Li Keqiang announced the initiative in May as tens of millions of workers have lost their jobs due to business closures after Covid-19 hit China. National Bureau of Statistics reported that Q1 2020 unemployment rate is at 5.9 in urban areas, while GDP contracted 6.8%.

Street vendors were once a vibrant part of China’s economy and urban landscape, providing a mean for the migrants and the poor to make a living. Back in late last century, many people who got into selling food or daily wares on the street were laid off from ill-performed state-owned enterprises. 

However, since China's economy took off in the last decade, governments across all levels began cracking down heavily on street vendors for a variety of offenses, including pollution and tax evasion, etc. The worst to ever have happened was in Beijing, 2017, where the municipal government launched an unprecedented attack on what they called the "low-end population", tearing down street stalls, factories and living quarters in order to drive out migrant workers who were barely making it on the city outskirts.

Fast forward to today, street vendors have regained its status, as Premier Li praised the achievements from cities such as Chengdu and Yantai for creating hundreds of thousands of jobs by giving street stalls permission to operate. Chinese tech industry were quick to jump on the street vendor bandwagon, with major companies including Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan and JD.com flocking to dish out cheap loans and subsidies, provide logistics support and payment solutions to millions of owners of newly established small businesses.

Ant Financial, Alibaba's fintech arm, promised that its mobile wallet app Alipay will offer interest-free loans to 30 million vendors, and 70 billion RMB of interest-free credit line to consumers to make purchases everywhere, including on street vendors. J

D.com, another one of the top e-commerce websites, launched an initiative to source about 50 billion RMB worth of quality goods for street vendors, and provide each one of them with a maximum 100,000 RMB interest-free loan to stock up. The company said in a statement that it plans to help more than a million street vendors and create 5 million jobs in the supply chain, procurement and logistics sectors.

Tencent’s WeChat announced to offer payment solutions, subsidies, marketing supports and even training for up to 50 million street vendors, with the end goal of digitally transforming them to increase their income. Local services platform Meituan Dianping is also handing out loans to vendors and vouchers to consumers in collaboration with local governments.

Guangzhou city partnered with WeChat this month to hold a live streaming shopping festival to boost sales of local produce. In attempts to get the attention of the regime, as well as promoting various live streaming platforms, many tech CEOs also made their own live streamed e-commerce debuts under the banner of street vendor economy, selling merchandise sourced all over the country.