Street vendors disrupt this picture and since 2008 have been negotiating a ban in many preferred locales. In their drive to create a modern, ‘civilised’ capital, Vietnam’s central government and Hanoi’s municipal authorities have a particular image of security, orderliness and development. This article critiques the relevance of this vision for street vendor livelihoods in a politically socialist locale, albeit one embracing neo-liberal modernity. Gibson-Graham and supporters regarding how people make a living outside the capitalist framework, lists street vendors and informal economies of the global South as potential components. The alternative ‘diverse economies’ vision of J. While providing some buffer against destitution, existing forms of social protection do little to alleviate the social exclusion and inequality resulting from post-reform dispossession. Thirdly, the rise of social protection is shaped by state control, wealth disparities between regions and social classes, and a care politics deeming certain groups as failing to meet the human capital requirements of the new economy. Secondly, the dislocations and inequalities induced by marketization have been coupled with greater involvement of a broad range of social actors in welfare provision. Such politics are the outcome of the Communist party-state’s dual project of legitimation and control, as widespread social conflicts challenge its legitimacy. First, welfare restructuring in these countries has gone through two overlapping processes of contraction and expansion, underlined by changing politics of needs and shifting modes of governance since their shift from state to market socialism. We make three arguments in this review of the literature on rural welfare governance in Vietnam and China. The article extends the Polanyian notion of double movement by showing the tendency of social protection to be reincorporated into the realm of the market. In the context of hypermobility, such mutual entanglement makes it possible for global finance to turn the countryside into a new frontier. Underlying the rise of private life insurance in these rural communities is an uncertain process in which new prudentialist rationalities are domesticated into locally meaningful ideas of risk and care. Almost unheard of in this region just a few decades ago, private life insurance has come to be taken for granted by local people, many of whom are involved in precarious trajectories of transnational labour mobility. The author uses the concept of portfolios of social protection to denote the emergence of an eclectic mix of measures to manage risks and to prepare for the future in the context of intensified perceptions of risks and the increasing privatization of care. While demonstrating resilience, their practices suggest tactics of engaging with power that involve a great deal of moral ambiguity, which I argue is central to the increasing precaritisation of labour and the economy in Vietnam today.īased on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2018–19, this article analyses the changing composition of social protection on the ground in rural central Vietnam, including the recent spread of private life insurance among peasant families. It is therefore rife with opportunities for accumulating wealth, but also full of dangers for the waste traders, whose occupation of marginal urban spaces makes them easy targets of both rent-seeking state agents and rogue actors. Characterised by waste traders as a “half-dark, half-light zone”, the waste economy is unevenly regulated, made up of highly personalised ties, and relatively hidden from the public. Based on ethnographic research, I explore how the expansion of the network is foregrounded by the traders’ dealing with the precarious nature of waste trading, which is rooted in the social ambiguity of waste and migrants working with waste in the urban order. This article discusses the everyday practices of a mobile network of migrant waste traders originating from northern Vietnam, locating them in an expanding urban waste economy spanning across major urban centres.
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