Some Thoughts on Mao & Bicycles
Yes, thoughts of Mao and bicycles kicked-off my China experience. And they have come up continually ever since. Thanks to the airport ATM, it was only a few footsteps into China before Mao was looking me in the eyes. I had many copies of Mao’s portrait, with beautiful natural landscapes on the flipside. The juxtaposition of Mao and natural beauty stayed with me as I passed high-rise after high-rise on the midnight trip to my hostel. The majority of these massive buildings were only half complete. Construction was everywhere. At first, I wondered why they don’t team up and complete one building, before moving on to another. After a half hour of driving through such partial high-rises, I gave up on such thoughts and found my attention directed to common territory: bicycles. But it wasn’t the occasional midnight cyclist and motorbike that I was interested in. It was the infrastructure devoted to them. These are not bike lanes. They are full sized roads, but for bicycles. Between the bike and car roads are medians with planted trees and benches. It is apparent that unlike the US, where cyclists struggle to have bicycle stick figures painted on the shoulder of the road, in China the bicycle has long been accepted as a critical form of urban transportation.
But this is more than a difference in infrastructure. It is a urban-societal difference; it is a difference in mentality. It seems unlikely that a Beijing cyclist would hear motorists yell, ‘you don’t belong on the road’. (Unfortunately, in my experience, this still occurs regularly in cycling across America). I don’ want to tread on David Byrne’s toes with all this talk of international urban cycling (http://www.davidbyrne.com/art/books/bicycle_diaries/), but maybe history has something to say about this topic: it is almost as if American and Chinese cities are coming from opposite histories of urban cycling (at least in reference to the past fifty years or so). Throughout my childhood, any image of Beijing (or Peking) would be littered with bicycles. And we Americans would comment on it. I thought the mass of cyclists was cool. I suspect there were more comments of derision.
But this brings me back to Mao. In Kunming, when discussing environmental issues at a ICKCBI event, Mao’s urban planning emphasis on bicycles came up. It was inferred that Mao loved bicycles, and by extrapolation, that perhaps Mao was some kind of environmentalist. Something seemed off, but regardless, the thought was planted in my head.
A few days later I brought it up during a discussion at the offices of a Kunming environmental NGO. This conversation was on notions of nature and environmentalism, and how they might differ from America to China. First we discussed the American concept of manifest destiny, and the deeper rooted Western notion of ‘man’s’ drive to harness or manage nature. Then the conversation turned to Chinese culture and nature: does there seem to be an idea in the West that Chinese culture (ancient, at least) is closer to nature? With most characters based on natural phenomenon, the language certainly is. The NGO employee didn’t seem happy about this Chinese stereotype. Then I brought up environmentalist Mao; the NGO worker laughed. In Chinese, she said a commonly used slogan of Mao’s. It had to do with the importance of harnessing nature. I hadn’t heard about this, but Mao’s use of it makes perfect sense.
Mao wasn’t discussed further at the NGO meeting. Nor was he discussed during a lecture on ecotourism in China. But when walking the streets of Kunming, and looking at cycling infrastructure that would make David Byrne proud, I still think of Mao. I think of all the social and urban planning that is required in this transforming China. I wonder how different accomplishing such infrastructure is in China. It seems to be part of the system. Whether or not it goes back to Mao, anyone involved in cycling advocacy in The States would be envious of such a system. Or would they?