Of all the signs that China, after nearly three decades of headlong growth, has moved into a new era, few have struck me as forcefully as the news that the Shanghai city council is to ban bicycles from next year. I lived in China in the days when capitalist-style growth was regarded as political poison and I do not have much nostalgia for the political climate of those days. But I do remember with pleasure living in a city in which the bicycle was king.
Back then, only Communist party officials rode in cars — mainly a big green lumbering saloon called the Shanghai. They were driven by young men who wore white cotton gloves and carried large feather dusters with which, while waiting for their masters, they tried to keep the city’s grime off the gleaming chrome bumpers. The car windows were curtained, lest the masses catch a glimpse of their rulers. If a very important visitor was in town there might be a Hongqi — a Red Flag — on the streets, a huge black limousine complete with bonnet flagpole. Both, though, were relatively rare. The rest of the city got about on buses or on bikes.
For Chinese, getting hold of a bike was not entirely straightforward. Even if you had the money there was a waiting list, and prized items like the bicycle were allocated to political favourites. There was one universal model, made in Shanghai — the no-gear Flying Pigeon — black, steel-framed and very heavy. It was sturdy enough to carry an entire family, a substantial piece of furniture or a pig, strapped to the carrier on the back. So desirable was it that, even in Mao’s China where official propaganda insisted that theft was almost non-existent, it was essential to have a lock and to park in an official bike park, where, for five fen — a sum too small to measure in sterling — an attendant would guard your wheels until you returned.
There was no waiting list for foreigners, still thin on the ground in those politically hostile days. And owning a bike opened up a whole series of opportunities. It made conversations possible, for instance, at a time when to sit down and talk to a foreigner could put a Chinese citizen at some risk. Drifting along the street for a while, in the two-wheeled equivalent of step, meant that people would chat without falling under suspicion.
It also allowed a foreigner to get about inconspicuously. Foreigners were so rare, and exciting events so few, that any foreigner on foot was quickly surrounded by a large, if uncommunicative, crowd. It was not a pleasant experience. On a bike, though, the crowd barely had time to register you before you were gone. With the right clothes and hat, they sometimes barely noticed at all.
It has been some years since cycling was a pleasant experience in Chinese cities. A combination of greed, corruption and bad planning has transformed many of China’s cities into polluted dystopias, friendly neither to the bike nor the human being.
China’s idea of the modern has tended to lag behind the west. In the 20th century, dreary apartment blocks — copied from the communist bloc — were still being erected long after they had gone out of fashion in the west. And when the great boom began in the 80s and Chinese cities began to develop, there was a rush to profit from the fat contracts on offer. Conservation was not on the radar and the development of clean and efficient public transport took a back seat to building roads. The idea of the green city, now the most desirable objective in highly urbanised societies, scarcely entered the imagination of Chinese city planners.
The private car exemplified the modern and dictated the pursuit of an urban model that was already choking up around the world. Old Shanghai neighbourhoods were torn down or cut to shreds by new urban motorways that soon became giant traffic jams. The authorities did not appear to think that cycle tracks should be part of the plan.
In Shanghai, the Bund, the grand riverfront boulevard where lovers used to go to look at the Yangtze, where students would hang out waiting for a tourist on whom to practise their English, and where passers-by could idle away an hour watching the river traffic, was transformed into a deafening six-lane highway.
There are still nine-million bikes on Shanghai’s streets, compared with fewer than 200 000 cars. But cycling, once a real pleasure that opened up the city’s secrets to anyone with a will to explore, has became dangerous. Now it will soon be illegal. In the 70s, I could cycle from my university to downtown Shanghai in half an hour. Today, by car, for much of the day, it can take double that. The past three decades of growth have brought great material benefits to millions of Chinese. But one day, they will also count what they have lost. – Guardian Unlimited Â