Traders versus the State: Negotiating Urban Renewal in Lào Cai City, Vietnam

In recent years, Vietnam has intensified programs aimed at building “civilized, rich, and beautiful” cities. The modernization of urban markets forms part of these efforts. This essay focuses on the contestations and negotiations surrounding the upgrade of a state‐run market in the northern border city of Lào Cai. In order to retain their stall use rights in the new market building, the traders were required to invest a sum that many felt was beyond their immediate means. Frustrated with the top‐down implementation of policy decisions that would potentially displace less affluent vendors from the market, the traders organized in protest and submitted petitions and complaints to various levels of government. In this paper, I critically examine the argumentation strategies employed by both traders and government officials during several formal hearings held in 2014. I argue that rather than arriving at a solution that satisfied the traders’ concerns, the dispute between market traders and state officials ultimately reinforced some of the hegemonic terms in which the marketization and urbanization of Vietnam’s borderlands take place. [Vietnam; Lào Cai City; Market Redevelopment; Urbanization; Protests].