For college students in the city of Zhengzhou, Henan province, it was a brief moment of freedom: a short-lived craze for cycling overnight on ride-share rental bikes to the nearby city of Kaifeng for a bit of fun, food, and...
Reuters reports that Australian bicyclist Michael Rogers blames contaminated food he ate in China...
Once one of four symbols of modern living in China, alongside wristwatches, sewing machines and radios, the bicycle’s position as a status symbol took a battering with the advent of widespread car ownership. Its fall from...
Evan Osnos’ Letter from China looks at Beijing’s bike lanes: First, a taxonomy. Beijing has at least three definable species of bike lane. The most luxurious, which we’ll call Business Class, is a ribbon of...
From The Guardian: After wrestling for years with Beijing’s appalling traffic and pollution problems, city planners have come up with a distinctly old-fashioned solution: bicycles. Municipal officials want to boost the...
AP looks at the new fad of electric bicycles, for those tired of a long bike commute but who can’t afford a car: Workers weary of crammed public transport or pedaling long distances to jobs are upgrading to battery-powered...
From the AP: For a vivid insight into the clash of old and new in China, follow the bicycle. Morning rush hour in Beijing and Shanghai used to be rivers of cyclists flowing in a majestic hush down broad bike lanes. Today, many...
Not every fashionable wedding demands a lavish banquet and a limousine, reports Shanghai Daily – and for the record number of Chinese couples expected to marry this year, that may be a relief: When Xu Lin and her...
China is known as the Bicycle Kingdom, maybe also the Bicycle Theft Kingdom. Taking Beijing as an example, bicycle thefts happen everywhere, especially on campuses. I personally lost four bikes during my college years in...
From Shanghai Daily: Standing atop a stool clamped to a bicycle rack in her long white wedding gown, the giggling bride clasped her bouquet of white roses as the bridegroom pedaled frantically down Huayuan Road in Beijing’s Haidian District to the reception restaurant. “This is the way we like it. I’ll never regret this,” Fan […]
Utne.com’s Webwatch takes on the rhetorical question: China has long been recognized as a nation of bicyclists, but as its economy booms and the government paves the world’s largest interstate-highway system, pedaling two-wheelers are being pushed aside to make room for cars. As Bill Donahue reports for Sierra, the Chinese have been reaping the benefits […]
From Richard Spencer’s blog: The Beijing I saw from my car driver’s seat was the Beijing of quadruple carriageways and Audi A6s, of the Glory China Centre and the Pacific Century Plaza and Central Park, my favourite luxury housing compound for the sarcastic reason that since it was finished the road system nearby has all […]
From the Telegraph: Chinese cities have been ordered to put back their cycle lanes in the hope of restoring the nation’s image as the land of the bicycle. The picture of Chinese cities as a seething tide of grey-clad cyclists, perpetuated until very recently in western advertisements, has long since given way to one of […]
From BBC News: A senior Chinese government official has criticised city planners for ignoring the needs of the nation’s cyclists. In recent years the number of bikes on China’s streets has dropped as car ownership has increased. The bicycle used to be China’s main form of transport. At one point there were some 500 million […]
From the Guardian: A few years ago, Beijing was probably the most bicycle-friendly capital on Earth. A flat, dry city with broad, tree-lined cycle lanes patrolled by protective traffic wardens was perfect for two wheels. The streets teemed with so many bicycles that they became as much a symbol of China as the giant panda. […]
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