{"id":702679,"date":"2024-11-20T13:17:48","date_gmt":"2024-11-20T21:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/?p=702679"},"modified":"2024-11-20T13:18:02","modified_gmt":"2024-11-20T21:18:02","slug":"translation-confessions-of-a-collegiate-zhengzhou-to-kaifeng-night-cyclist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2024\/11\/translation-confessions-of-a-collegiate-zhengzhou-to-kaifeng-night-cyclist\/","title":{"rendered":"Translation: \u201cConfessions of a Collegiate \u2018Zhengzhou-to-Kaifeng Night-Cyclist\u2019\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
For college students in the city of Zhengzhou, Henan province, it was a brief moment of freedom: a short-lived craze for cycling overnight<\/a> on ride-share rental bikes to the nearby city of Kaifeng for a bit of fun, food, and frivolity. But the sheer volume of cyclists on the road\u2014as many as 100,000 or more<\/a> per night\u2014led to traffic jams, littering, safety concerns, and seas of abandoned rental bikes. It may also have piqued government suspicions<\/a> about the students\u2019 possible motives for making the late-night trek en masse. There soon ensued a crackdown<\/a> on the trend, with increased patrols by traffic police, restrictions on the weekend use of roads and cycling paths<\/a>, curfews and lockdowns<\/a> at local college campuses, and bike-sharing platforms remotely disabling their vehicles<\/a> if cyclists tried to ride them out of certain designated zones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Zhengzhou, a city of 12.6 million, is home to 40 colleges and universities<\/a>, with many students living in crowded dorm rooms that do not afford much privacy. Some welcomed the 50-kilometer (30-mile) bike ride to Kaifeng as a chance to escape their oppressive school routines, celebrate their youth (\u201cYouth is priceless!<\/a>\u201d was one popular slogan of the rides), and sample Kaifeng\u2019s famous soup-dumplings and scenic spots before making the one-hour train trip back to campus. Although the nocturnal cyclists seemed to be in it just for the fun, the spectacle of these youthful crowds seemed to make government officials nervous, perhaps calling to mind the large gatherings of young people that galvanized the White Paper protests<\/a> of late 2022 and the Shanghai Halloween revelry<\/a> of 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although late-night Zhengzhou-to-Kaifeng cycling went viral on Chinese social media, there has been a fair amount of online censorship of the topic. CDT editors have archived 11 related articles and essays<\/a>, of which three<\/a> were deleted<\/a> by platform censors. One essay reported that, at least for a time, the name \u201cKaifeng\u201d was being blocked, so netizens were forced to resort to using the abbreviation \u201cKF<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n CDT has translated a lengthy excerpt of a first-person account by 18-year-old college student Yang Yu, who made the four-hour nighttime bike ride to Kaifeng with her boyfriend and some friends<\/strong><\/a>. She talks about the journey, her motivations for going, the criticism she received afterward from her mother and others, and the experience of being infantilized by college administrators who instituted curfews and confined Yang and her classmates to campus on the weekends:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n