The other mechanism was a systematic push to eliminate all vestiges of those extant features of the city considered to be backward by the policy elites. These included those small and informal market activities that were a ubiquitous sight in urban China in the 1980s – food and vegetable stalls operated by peasants at the intersections of cities and the countryside. In the first half of the 1980s, many spontaneous marketplaces had sprung up in various neighborhoods in central Shanghai, hawking goods ranging from vegetables and eggs to small-scale industrial goods, as detailed in a
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