How will Shanghai react to a bicycle ban?

Shanghai will ban bicycles on all major roads

Shanghai is home to 19 million people and is the largest city in the largest country in the world. It was recently announced that the government in Shanghai will ban bicycles on all major roads in an effort to alleviate traffic. On the streets in Shanghai, taxis, buses and luxury cars struggle for space with masses of bicycles. If the bicycle ban wasn't enough, other vehicles are also under attack:

... (The Shanghai government is) introducing emission controls on all vehicles and a total ban on further licenses for motor scooters (cars are already discouraged, with license plates costing the equivalent of 10 years salary for most Chinese people).

Shanghai citizens haven't reacted to the bicycle ban yet, but given recent trends in China, it's likely that they will. Although the government has announced its plans, there's still time to see whether they have the will to carry them out. While living in China, I realized that it is the will to enforce the law, not the law itself, that is the rule in China.

In the city of Xi'an, motor scooters weren't allowed in the area where I lived, but this law was almost never enforced and motor cycles and scooters ruled the road. Recently in Shanghai, a coalition of lawyers dedicated themselves to defending the residents of housing blocks that are being cleared for economic development. The developers are usually tycoons making more money on underhanded deals involved in the construction than in the development itself. This includes getting the land for a bargain by being allowed to loosely interpret Chinese laws that literally only allow residential areas to be cleared for social works such as hospitals and schools.

Though the lawyers defending displaced Shanghai residents have yet to win a law suit, litigation is on the rise in China. People are feeling like they have more rights and are now more free to demand these rights through the legal system. There are many examples of this booming trend:

One woman took a neighbor to court for naming a dog after her and then loudly insulting it in public (she wanted an apology and 1,000 yuan in damages). A seven-year-old girl filed suit against a theatre in Beijing because it said she was too small to attend a performance, even though she had a ticket. A man in Chengdu sued a bank that had imposed a height requirement on employees and he was too short to work there.

These days, the common government attitude is that the old China needs to go before the new China can come. For the deputy mayor of Shanghai, "the bicycle is just a reminder of past poverty." He forgets that poverty is still a major problem and that while many people are getting rich, more and more people are being left behind. Look at it this way, the rich people are largely in the cities and the poor people are in the country (an imbalance Chairman Mao pledged his life to overcoming). While they're separated now, ask most people around China where the living is good and they'll tell you Shanghai or some other booming east- coast city (usually Shanghai is singled out as it's touted by the government as Communist China's greatest native success, unlike Hong Kong with its British past).

So there are millions of people who, if they don't have a scheme to get a job in Canada or go to University in England, want to move to Shanghai where you need a specially issued residence permit. This permit is a whole lot easier to get if you have a job and so there is a significant portion of the population who are recent arrivals looking for a job and are staying with friends or relatives while they live off their savings. This adds pressure to the poor lower class already living in the city, and it is people like these who are going to be forced to abandon their bikes when the new law takes affect in Shanghai next year.

The local government in Guangzhou recently tried to do what Shanghai has done, banning bike traffic from certain main streets in order to ease congestion, but had to back down due to public outrage. Next door to Guangzhou, in Hong Kong, 500,000 residents recently marched in the streets to protest an anti-terrorism bill that would have encroached on the rights they inherited from the British government. The bill was withdrawn.

Mr. Chen, of the judicial reform centre, is certain China has just begun this long march [to freedom]. "It's an inevitable trend," he said. "People will demand more political rights and more human rights. There is a natural order to it: first economic rights, then democratic rights and political rights. Step by step, people will demand it."

While the Chinese people have put up with a lot of hardship over the years, it seems that there is a limit. Though membership in the WTO requires China to crack down on pirated DVD's, shops selling them are multiplying instead of being cleared off the streets. Many people I know in China think that the government would never be able to ban these cheap DVDs because they are just too popular. The truth is that DVD's are quickly becoming the modern day Coliseum, a cheap form of entertainment that keeps the masses happy. Most people can afford a DVD player with a minimum of savings, and pirated DVD's are so cheap that Chinese people I talked to refused to believe their cost in western countries (usually around 20-30 times more expensive).

Economic and Political rights are at least indirectly linked. Making money means you must allow people enough freedom to make financial decisions of their own. The people's ability to make these decisions will be threatened if they can't even decide the mode of transportation that they take to work. China's cities could never survive the kind of automobile transformation that America went through in the 50's. If Shanghai's upcoming ban on bicycles gives any clue to how the Chinese government intends to tackle their mounting transportation problem, the country is in for some real trouble.