Bike-sharing brings out bad manners in China

BEIJING — Liu Lijing, a mechanic in Beijing, does not usually pay much attention to manners. He does not mind when people blast loud music, and he strolls the alleyways near his home in a tank top stained with grease. But when a stranger recently ditched a bicycle in the bushes outside his door, Liu was irate.

Startups have flooded the city with shared bikes, he complained, and people have been leaving them all over the place without thinking about other residents. “There’s no sense of decency anymore,” he muttered, picking up the discarded bike and heaving it into the air in anger. “We treat each other like enemies.”

There are now more than 16 million shared bicycles in China’s trafficclogged cities, thanks to a fierce battle for market share among 70-plus companies backed by more than $1 billion in financing. These startups have reshaped the urban landscape, putting bikes equipped with GPS and digital locks on almost every corner in a way Silicon Valley can only dream of.

But their popularity has been accompanied by a wave of misbehavior. Because the startups do not use fixed docking stations, riders abandon bicycles along streets and public squares, snarling traffic and cluttering sidewalks. Thieves have taken them by the tens of thousands for personal use or to sell for parts. Angry and mischievous vandals hang them in trees, bury them in construction sites and throw them into lakes and rivers.

Such problems have raised questions about the sustainability of China’s bike-share boom. But the debacle also has led many Chinese to look for deeper explanations and ask if bike-sharing has revealed essential flaws in the national character, prompting a far-reaching debate about social decay and the decline of decorum and morality in the country.

In some places, the authorities have confiscated tens of thousands of bicycles and imposed parking restrictions. News outlets have documented the waste with astounding images of mountains of candycolored bicycles, each hue representing a different bike-share company.

“It’s a battle every day,” said Ke Jin, a security guard at a residential compound in northeast Beijing, as he cleared a path that had been blocked by a tangled heap of blue and yellow bikes. “It’s human nature not to care.”