The Rise And Fall Of M Night Market: A Study On Migrant Vendors’ City Experience

It takes China only 30 years to achieve the urbanization goal which spent western world about 200 years. Large amounts of rural-urban migrants pour into cities. They bring the development, so does the urban problems. As an inevitable consequence of China’s rapid urbanization, the blossom of vendor-economy has to face the unstable policies of government. As for those vendors who migrant from rural areas, how do they experience the urbanizing process under this situation?M Night Market, which has a history from prosperity to vanishment, also contains a vendors-history of making a living in Nanjing city. This paper discribes the life changes of those vendors in M Night Market and attempts to offer a case introducing how a group of people experience the city under rapid urbanization. The main clue of the paper is the vendors changing experience in city, which actually could be seen as a process of "the urbanization of man".When the M Night Market is flourishing, the urbanization of man is relatively successful:vendors create an "our place" in the city, and they partly integrate into the city through the place. However, as the street continue to be divided, there’s lots of troubles occurring in the public space. Government can not tolerate the dirty and disorderly space exhibiting on the main road, so the night market is forced to be eliminated. Although the vendors resist leaving the place, their city life is overturned. According to the investigation, some vendors, especially those traditional ones, are drove to the edge of the city, or some areas more far-away from the city.Another hidden clue of the paper is the government involving into the the changing of city space. This might be the mechanism behind the vendors life change. With the development of the city, the undeveloped space which M Night Market occupy has become a subsidiary commercial center. According to government’s logic, a subsidiary commercial center must have smooth road, clear environment and international city image. Therefore, the night market should be cleaned off from the public street. What’s more, during the expansion of urban space, state power is biased by middle class’ taste. It means that all things in lower class people’s life are arbitrarily viewed as rude and intolerable for modernization, and therefore these things should be eliminated and replaced by bourgeois things.To some extent, there is great gap between the fast urbanization of space and low urbanization of man during the modernization in contemporary China. It is the gap that makes Chinese cities more and more modern and international, but at the same time alienates vendors and other lower class people from the bourgeoisified society.