Abstract
This chapter examines the regulation of motorcycle taxis in Guangzhou and its implications for the construction of migrant identity. The motorcycle taxi refers to a motorcycle used to provide commercialised, highly flexible and door-to-door transport service. In Guangzhou, this informal taxi service plays a notable role in sustaining the livelihood of a subgroup of urban migrants. However, alongside the ambition of local officials and elites to rationalise and sanitise urban space, motorcycle mobility fell victim to discourses and representations which constructed its unruliness, incivility and disorderliness. Eventually, the use of motorcycles was outlawed from the central city of Guangzhou in 2007 by the municipal government. As a result, the motorcycle taxi, as the only form of motorcycle mobility which persists on Guangzhou’s streets to this day, has become a primary object of state disciplinary power. This chapter first frames the regulation of motorcycles within debates on the politics of mobility and speed. It then outlines the context of the regulation of motorcycle mobility in Guangzhou, with a specific focus on the ways in which discourses and knowledge rendered the problematic of motorcycle mobility narratable and intelligible. It then moves to document and reflect upon state regulatory practices directed towards motorcycle taxis, which are operated at the street-level. Engaging with the notion of motility, this chapter argues that the curtailing of physical mobility at the street-level constrains migrants’ access to socioeconomic resources and hence sabotages their prospect of social mobility. Finally, this chapter investigates the street-level, largely improvised tactics deployed by motorcycle taxi drivers to eschew state regulation. It analyses street encounter with state policing power as formative of the migrants’ identity and subjectivity. However, instead of celebrating such tactics as romantic resistance to hegemonic power, it contends that street-level negotiation with state power contributions to the consolidation, rather than alleviation, of a subaltern identity experienced among migrant motorcycle drivers.
Some text of this chapter also appeared in an article published as: Qian J. (2015). No right to the street: motorcycle taxis, discourse production and the regulation of unruly mobility. Urban Studies, 52(15): 2922–2947
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Notes
- 1.
While I acknowledge that the term ‘subaltern’ has rich colonial and postcolonial connotations, I use it in the same way as Gramsci (1971) initially developed this idea, which was to generically refer to social groups that are oppressed and/or at the margin of social structures. I use this term to describe not only actually existing disempowerment, but also migrants’ self-definition of their status. I find this term useful because, in both Gramsci’s original conception and its later application in postcolonial studies, its conceptualisation centres on particular groups’ inability to exercise agency and the deprivation of one’s voice within the hegemonic structure of social power. In other words, this term underscores a state of domination, instead of merely economic or material inequality. Anthropologist Pun (2005), for example, uses the conception of subalternity to characterise the situation of domination inflicted on female migrant workers (dagongmei) in China, offering a vivid example of the application of the term beyond postcolonial contexts.
- 2.
Data on the circulation and readership of Chinese newspapers can be found in the website: www.chinesebk.com/.
- 3.
After 2004, many motorcycle riders—in particular motorcycle taxi drivers—began to use what were called electric motorcycles, a design of motor-vehicles upgraded from human-powered bicycles but propelled by electronic motors rather than fossil fuel. However, in 2006 the municipal government of Guangzhou also outlawed the use of electrically driven motorcycles in the entire metropolitan area of Guangzhou, based on the same reasons as outlawing conventional motorcycles. In this chapter, the term of motorcycle taxi refers to taxi service provided by both types of vehicles.
- 4.
The regulation of motorcycles is enmeshed in a broader project of cracking down on street nuisances, including street robberies, unlicensed/untaxed transport services, the violation of traffic rules and road accidents. Numerous police campaigns have been launched to regulate not only gasoline- or electricity-propelled motorcycles, but also tricycles, motorised wheelchairs operated by disabled people and self-modified vehicles. Regulation of all these sorts of vehicles are based on very similar rationales, framed in terms of security, traffic order, robbery, and, sometimes, illegal parking (source: http://www.gzjd.gov.cn/gzjdw/gaxw/ztbd/zzwlc/20141205/detail-264674.shtml). These vehicles are lumped together into the category of ‘five types of vehicles’ (“wulei che”) in local police vocabulary.
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Qian, J. (2016). Disciplined Mobility and Migrant Subalternity: Sketching the Politics of Motorcycle Taxis in Guangzhou. In: Wang, D., He, S. (eds) Mobility, Sociability and Well-being of Urban Living. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48184-4_2
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