Wet Markets in Urban China: Vitality and Challenges

The complicated reality of fresh food retail in urban China is that although supermarket chains are rapidly proliferating, wet markets, a kind of traditional food market where independent traders primarily sell “wet” items such as vegetables, meats, and seafood, has been on the rise for the past several decades, and continues to play an important role in the fresh food sector in urban China. This study addresses the question of how the resilience of wet markets can be explained, and also asks if the current prosperity of wet markets is sustainable. The data for this research is based on 14 months of fieldwork in the Hainan Province of China. The data collection includes archival research, participatory observations in 14 local marketplaces, 113 surveys about the social networks of food traders, 304 surveys about food shopping and consumers’ consumption culture, and more than 25 in-depth interviews of key informants such as government officials, supermarket managers, and food producers. Focusing on the vitality of and challenges to wet markets in urban China, this study analyzes how the three main participants – traders (the economy), local and national governments (politics), and consumers (culture) – continually connect, compete, and conflict with one other. This study argues that the vitality of wet markets ultimately rests in the fragmented food trade system in which food commodities pass through a number of trade levels such as wholesalers, middlemen, and agents. Relying on extensive social networks, wet market traders are able to flexibly connect to different trade levels, offering these markets competitive advantages over supermarkets in terms of food freshness and assortment. These advantages correspond with consumer’s consumption habits and a food culture of “eating fresh, buying local.” However, the combined pressure of capitalist intervention and local governments with a strong incentive to embody modernity has become the most apparent challenge to the sustainable development of wet markets. The power asymmetry between the weak trader community and strong government aggravates this scenario. This study forecasts that in the near future, wet markets will survive in much of China, but their advantages will continue to shrink