From informal hawkers to state employees: newspaper vendors’ labor incorporation and identity reconstruction in Shanghai, 1911–1956

This article examines the transformation of Shanghai’s newspaper vendors from marginalized hawkers to state workers between 1911 and 1956. Vendors operated in a guild-based, hierarchical system dominated by powerful wholesalers, functioning largely beyond state control through informal rules and territorial monopolies. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the state implemented postal-distribution integration and socialist transformation to reorganize this chaotic network. Drawing on archival materials, contemporary newspapers, and institutional documents, this article examines how institutional restructuring, ideological education, and occupational redefinition reshaped vendors’ social and occupational identities. Through these measures, vendors were gradually incorporated into the unified postal system, shifting from profit-driven commerce to politically charged propaganda service. Their official identity was elevated from urban underclass to masters of the nation in state discourse. Yet this process was not unidirectional. Vendors displayed agency through everyday resistance, including passive waiting and business slowdowns, and further negotiated their new status through occupational networks, mutual-aid practices, and demands for institutional protection. This article argues that the incorporation of marginal labor was a negotiated interplay between state power and grassroots survival logic.