CHINA: Mobility Measured in Wheels – Two For Slow, Four For Fast

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Xiong Lei

BEIJING, Oct 25 1996 (IPS) - It now takes four wheels instead of two to be counted among those traveling the fast lane to prosperity in China.

“I think you upgrade yourself by learning to drive,” says Li Jinsheng, a Beijing doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. “With a licence I think car, not bike — I would have to call it an advancement.”

She is among hundreds of thousands of Chinese who annually obtain driver’s licences in the hope of one day being classified among China’s burgeoning upper class.

In Beijing alone, 300,000 Chinese obtained driver’s licences in 1995 — 50,000 more than the previous year, according to figures obtained from the Motor Vehicle Administration..

And while bicycles still dominate the road — by an estimated seven million to one million in the capital, with a much higher ratio in rural China — the increasingly long traffic lines on Beijing streets is a sure sign that more and more Chinese are trading in their two-wheelers for ignition keys.

Another sure sign is that driving instructors are laughing all the way to the bank, while the state bicycle manufacturing company is contemplating if it will be able to cope with life in the fast lane when public funding dries up.

“I yell out when learners stall or crunch the gears,” says 47- year-old Wang Changping, an instructor at the Great Wall Driving School, one of the capital’s largest. “Sometimes I can’t control myself because….well, I want them to pass the test because when they do, I get a bonus!”

The state-run Tianjin Bicycle Factory is on the other hand battling to survive in the cut-throat world of a market economy after monopolising the Chinese market for more than four decades.

Just after the Communist victory in 1949, the Flying Pigeon, a sturdy, iron workhorse produced by the Tianjin Bicycle Factory, became China’s most widely used velocipede and a necessity in every family.

How times have changed during 16 years of economic reforms.

As one of China’s largest state-run enterprises, Tianjin Bicycle Factory is being urged by the government to make its own way without state subsidies.

Government’s plans to make the company effectively work like a private enterprise come at a time when profits have taken a nose dive as the bicycle industry in China — a kingdom of 360 million bicycles — has been invaded by foreign producers.

Until 1989, bicycles were still rationed and could only be purchased with a special coupon. Now hundreds of companies produce forty million bikes for a market that sells thirty million bicycles yearly.

Its wings clipped, Flying Pigeon is struggling to compete, company officials say.

“In this market, competition is harsh and everything depends on quality, technology and color,” says Sha, the company official. “This is a large, state-run factory, and now China is encouraging reform and change in the management.”

But Tianjin Bicycle Factory is not only being run off the road by foreign bicycle manufacturers. Driving is the new trend in town.

Driving instructors say that they first noticed a new trend toward the end of the 1980s.

“Years ago, learners were mainly those assigned to work as professional drivers for units,” recalls Chen Shengdang, a retired police officer who now heads the Great Wall Driving School. “Of course their employers paid for them.”

But then the faces of the learners suddenly became familiar ones — businessmen, successful artists, film and pop stars — all eager to test their skills behind the wheel rather than be chauffeur driven.

Then at the turn of the decade, still another set of new faces. This time ordinary Beijingers “just making good salaries” started seeking lessons at the school.

It is this latter group that make up most of the 300,000 Beijingers that earned the right to drive on China’s roads last year — though most of those cannot afford to buy a car.

The cheapest domestically produced car costs around 60,000 yuan (7,250 dollars) and while commercial banks have begun to offer special loans for car purchases, Chen says more than a third of his trainees are learning to drive without any assured access to a car — either of their own or their employers’.

But that does not stop them from parting with between 2,200 and 3,500 yuan (260 dollars to 420 dollars) to obtain what they see as a passport to upward mobility.

It is a trend that has not gone unnoticed by the media with the “Beijing Youth Daily”, one of the capital’s most popular newspapers carrying out a survey last April asking readers ‘What’s the point in obtaining a licence if one has no vehicle to drive?’

At the time it made reference to a well-known Chinese proverb that goes: “There must be a road when the cart arrives.”

Tang Haifan, editor of the newspaper, said responses to the questionnaire were mixed.

Ma Dengyun, a clerk at a recreation centre in Beijing felt that seeking to obtain a licence without a car was simply a waste of time, money and energy.

Shen Xiaoping, who just identified himself as a reader, thought otherwise. “The ability to drive is another skill, like swimming. Who has the time to learn to swim when he is already in deep water?”

Li Jinsheng, in her forties, passed the driving test last April. She does not own a car, but nonetheless believes she has “upgraded” herself by learning to drive. “It can also make my otherwise quiet life more interesting.”

Xiao Ying, an accountant in her early twenties, saw a driving licence as a passport to independence. “All my male colleagues can drive and I got fed up have to ask them for lifts. Now I can drive myself and I don’t have to depend on them anymore.”