Beijing’s ugly side emerges with bike sharing

With digital locks, GPS, riders can abandon machines anywhere

BEIJING — Liu Lijing, a mechanic in Beijing, does not usually pay much attention to manners. He does not mind when people blast 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 on the road in China’s traffic-clogged cities, thanks to a fierce battle for market share among 70-plus companies backed by a total of more than $1 billion in financing. These startups have reshaped the landscape, putting bikes equipped with GPS and digital locks on 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 haphazardly along streets and public squares, snarling traffic and cluttering sidewalks. Thieves have taken them by the tens of thousands, for personal use or selling them 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 has also 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.

“We look at ourselves, and we ask, ‘What is wrong with the Chinese nation, the Chinese people?’ ” said Xu Qinduo, a political commentator for China Radio International. Many people are proud of the country’s economic achievements and growing global clout, he added, but worry that it lacks a strong sense of morals.

Authorities have confiscated tens of thousands of bicycles and imposed parking restrictions. News outlets have documented the waste with astounding images of mountains of candy-colored bicycles, each hue representing a different bike-share company.

City officials are also grappling with creative vandalism of the bicycles, which varies in severity from smashing the locking device to setting the vehicle on fire. Some of the destruction has been attributed to residents angry about the blight of bikes piling up in their neighborhoods. But the police in several cities have also cited disgruntled rickshaw and taxi drivers upset that bike-sharing has sapped their business.

“It’s a battle every day,” Ke Jin, a security guard at a residential compound in northeast Beijing, said 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.”

On social media and in conversation, it is common to hear people describe bike-sharing as a “monster-revealing mirror” that has exposed the true nature of the Chinese people. In that sense, it is the latest chapter in a line of critical introspection that stretches back before the Communist Revolution.

Much of the discussion of the mess has revolved around the Chinese concept of suzhi, or inner quality, which can encompass a person’s behavior, education, ethics, intellect and taste. Chinese often invoke “low suzhi” in criticizing the bad habits or manners of others, and have bemoaned a deficit of suzhi in Chinese society for generations, sometimes arguing that they cannot be trusted with elections because their suzhi is too low.