Chinese society is structured along a historical urban-rural divide. In the early history of the People’s Republic of China (1950s-1980s), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cleaved society into two halves— the rural-agricultural and the urban-industrial— and erected institutional barriers to mobility between them. Rural people were deliberately locked in the resource-poor countryside and institutionally constrained from accessing economic opportunities in the cities. However, as actors developed strategies to navigate these controls, new patterns of informal mobility emerged and gave rise to spontaneous orders.
Based on a five-year mixed-method study of begging in contemporary Northwest China, this article explores the begging economy as a spontaneous order that emerged from the behaviors of groups of informal actors but not from their conscious designs. Drawing upon a diverse set of data including ethnographic observations, interviews with more than 200 begging people, and a geospatial survey of begging incomes in the city of Xi’an, the article examines the patterned informal behaviors of marginalized rural citizens who creatively circumvent state control to generate incomes through begging.
We show in the article that the economy of begging is a well-coordinated spontaneous order on three different spatial scales: national-level, city-level, and neighborhood-level. At the national-level we draw on demographic survey data to show that the economy of begging consists predominantly of farmers from the most impoverished parts of rural China, who circumvent the household registration system to travel to cities to beg in the agricultural off-season. At the city-level, we use our geospatial survey and interview data to demonstrate that begging involves a daily commute from affordable informal accommodations in the outskirts of the city to the city center, where income-generation potential is highest. At the neighborhood level, we describe through ethnographic observations how begging people periodically relocate themselves to evade police violence and detention.