Disciplined mobility and migrant subalternity: Sketching the politics of motorcycle taxis in Guangzhou

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.