This article examines spatial politics involved with the remaking of urban citizenship across Chinese cities. China’s emerging urban citizenship is shaped by its hukou system, which not only spatially and socially segregates rural migrants and urban natives in the cities, but also creates a large group of unregistered or ‘illegal’ migrants. This case study of unregistered migrant street venders looks at the implications of their unregistered status and how it has changed over time, shifting from creating benefits to becoming a burden. I capture how unregistered migrants’ lack of status has increasingly become an important basis of exclusion, and a burden, as they are denied access to new legitimate avenues of claims-making such as NGOs, courts and arbitration. This helps explain the increasingly common, and intensifying, clashes between migrant street vendors who are struggling for a right to the city and the chengguan, public security officers who are charged with regulating the streets.