Under the summer heat of an early June afternoon, Pan Yunxia was waiting quietly for customers to buy vegetables or socks from her roadside stalls in Beijing. It sounds like a strange mix. Pan, a sock vendor for over two decades, said the vegetables were new to her business. They were intended to be a convenience for nearby residents amid the coronavirus outbreak , she said. She took the bold, enterprising step to expand her wares beyond socks because the local government was loosening its grip on street vending and its minders – chengguan , or urban management officials – were no longer taking such a hard line with businesses on the street. “ Chengguan still warn us every day and threaten to drive us away,” Pan said. “But there’s a change of heart from the central government. The chengguan said they had not received any notice from their supervisors yet, but I guess they understand the change is going to happen sooner or later.” Wrapping up the annual meeting with the nation’s top legislative body last week, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang praised a city in a western province that recently allowed 36,000 mobile stalls to be set up along roadsides. As a result it created 100,000 jobs, Li said at a time when employment prospects in the country are gloomy under the shadow of coronavirus. On Monday, state media footage showed Li in front of a stall selling cooked food in Yantai in the eastern province of Shandong. “Street vendors and small shops are important sources of employment,” Li told local officials. “This is the ordinary people’s way of living. Just like those advanced and high tech industries, they are vital to the economy.” The remarks came after years of crackdowns on street hawkers across the nation, as China promoted high technology development and deemed roadside businesses a source of pollution, poor sanitation, traffic problems and generally causing a poor image for a city. Cities across China have instituted chengguan teams to drive away unlicensed street vendors. Clashes between chengguan and vendors became commonplace in mainland cities, leading to widespread resentment, and even tragedy. Xia Junfeng, a vendor selling kebabs along the streets of Shenyang in northeastern China, was convicted of murdering two chengguan in 2009 and executed four years later. His case became a nationwide controversy with discussion about whether he had acted in self-defence. And Zhang Guoyou, a watermelon vendor in Henan in central China, was sentenced to death in 2018 after he stabbed a chengguan to death in a quarrel in 2016. The death sentence was suspended for two years. Street vendors have also been key to the annual National Civilised City appraisals that are vital to local officials’ performance assessment. Until this year having vendors occupying the road or the presence of roadside markets or mobile vendors all led to marks deducted. But last month, China announced that these indicators were excluded from appraisals to help “resume social and economic order”. Zhu Min, an economist with Tsinghua University and former deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said China’s promotion of street vending was “an emergency solution” to address unemployment. He said it should be kept as “an economic norm” in the long run to give life to the economy. China’s urban unemployment rate hit a record high of 6.2 per cent in February, and even that was widely believed to be an underestimate. While things improved in the months after that, economists said the worst was yet to come for China’s massive labour force. Export orders were expected to slump further as the world struggled to contain the spread of Covid-19. The Economist Intelligence Unit said on April 22 that China’s unemployment rate could reach 10 per cent this year, with the loss of a further 22 million jobs in urban areas alone. China did not set an economic growth target for the first time in 2020, with the economy having contracted by 6.8 per cent in the first quarter of this year compared to a year earlier, because of the global pandemic and huge uncertainties in economy and trade. Instead of pursuing economic growth, China has shifted focus to ensuring employment, people’s livelihood and social stability, according to the premier’s government work report this year. Hu Xingdou, an independent political economist, said: “It’s unsurprising to see China making it convenient to help people make a living when employment is difficult. Social stability is crucial to the ruling of the Communist Party.” To many people, street vending is the last resort for making a living. A man, who would only give his surname as Liu, was selling strings of Buddhist rosary beads and combs in a street near a residential block in east Beijing on Tuesday. He said his employer, a trading company, collapsed because of the coronavirus. One of his friends, who was a supplier of the company, sold him the goods wholesale. “It’s said Buddhist beads can bring good luck. I hope they can bless me too and enable me to feed my family,” he said. Across the street, there is a sewing stall run by a grey-haired woman. The 74-year-old granny, giving her surname as Zhang, was threading a worn sewing machining. After several tries, she sighed to the customer sitting next to her: “Sorry, I’m too old. I can’t see clearly.” Zhang, from Henan province, said she had been a street vendor in Beijing for more than a decade. She said that the streets used to be marked by vendors selling strawberries in spring, watermelons in summer, sugar-coated haws on a stick in autumn and chestnuts and roast sweet potatoes in winter. Sold from the backs of bikes or motorbikes, these street treats were an indelible part of the capital’s culinary landscape. “Today, many vendors have been cleared away. Few people can survive the cat-and-mouse game every day with chengguan ,” she said, “I’m too old. They allow me to be here because they know I’ll die without the job.” In the Beijing Municipal Master Plan for 2016 to 2035, the government outlined a plan to turn the capital into a “world-class harmonious and liveable city”. Street trade, however, was not the sort of industry Beijing wanted to promote, nor did it fit with its vision of a harmonious and liveable city. In the latest campaign to weed out “low-end population” in 2017, Beijing evicted migrant workers and demolished “illegal” structures, many of them workplaces or homes for migrant workers. “I doubt the government truly welcomes us,” Zhang said, “I think the street will never be as busy and vigorous as it was before.”