11/09/24 - Biking at Night Edition

[We had a Friendsgiving potluck, and I accidentally managed to cut three of my fingers while trying to make glazed carrots. It is super uncomfortable to type right now, so I want to take maybe a few days off while these cuts heal. But I don’t want to leave you guys with no content either, so I figured I’d write a relatively shorter piece on my takes on some of the latest news coming out of China.]

In the last couple of days, a new fad is trending among uni students—biking at night. Specifically, biking to the city of Kaifeng by the hundreds of thousands. And it is the most ingenius mass protest I have ever witnessed, and I am genuinely impressed by these students’ ingenuity. It’s all decentralised—nobody’s organising these biking events. People just see others doing it on social media and spontaneously decide to join in and make their own social media posts. There aren’t any slogans or demands—in fact, plenty of people are biking while flying a Chinese flag and playing patriotic music, so it’s hard to justify shutting them down. But nonetheless, they’re completely clogging up roads for hours on end, depleting one city of all its shared bikes, and clogging up Kaifeng streets with hundreds of thousands of bikes. And then, at some point, the shared bike company has to hire people to move all these bikes back to where they came from.

I’ve seen quite a lot of discussion on why they’re doing this. In fact, mainstream opinion up until today has been very divided on whether this is something to be encouraged (at least they’re not sitting around playing on their phones) or to be wary of (but clearly, this is some kind of protest, right?). Officially today, all the universities are coming out with strict bans on biking at night, requiring all students to stay at school past a certain time. This is clearly a government response, because all the state media are posting articles justifying this decision (lots of trash, traffic jams, lack of bikes for commuters, etc). There’s even accusations that this is some kind of American scheme???

Personally, I don’t think this is nearly as complicated as people are making it out to be. I don’t think it’s about the unemployment rate or the economy or any of that. I’m inclined to believe the uni students themselves when they’re interviewed about why they’re doing this. “Youth has no price tag, life needs a bit of passion. There’s no need to make a big deal out of nothing, this is just how young people are.”

More specifically, I feel like this is the natural consequences of a generation that’s grown up with less freedom than ever before, who’s had full daily schedules since 3-years-old with tutoring classes and homework, who’s never been allowed any agency or choices. There’s only one road to success that their parents can see, and that is to involute your way through the Gaokao so you can get into a good school. I don’t think these people are actually necessarily thinking ahead to what’s going to happen when they get out of school. All they know right now is that this is the first time in their life that they’ve actually been in charge of themselves. They can, in fact, choose to bike 50km overnight for no particular reason and nobody can stop them. And that amount of freedom is exhilarating. It’s not that different from when Americans joke that the best thing about being an adult is that you can eat ice cream for dinner and nobody can tell you no.

And as for all the inconveniences they’re causing, they revel in it because this is not just an act of freedom, but an act of revenge too. People talk about vengeful shopping, like your parents never allowed you candy growing up, so you hoard 50lb bags of candy as an adult. Your parents never bought you clothes that fit, so you have an overstuffed closet as an adult. Your parents never cared about how much you wanted to just leave all your responsibilities behind and have a day of fun, of being able to decide what your own daily schedule was going to look like. So now you’re going to do whatever you want, screw how much it inconveniences everyone else.

This is ultimately just a bunch of young people exercising agency for the first time in their life and feeling the associated exhilaration. So what they stop traffic? So what if the streets are filled with abandoned bikes? So what you can’t find a bike to ride to work with? So what if there’s trash everywhere? They’re precisely exploring the concept that they don’t have to care about anyone else’s opinions. That they can do something just because they want to, no matter how much other people disapprove.

I see this dynamic all the time with kids from helicopter parent families, and like, 90% of the parents of Chinese uni students were probably helicopter parents (*statistic completely made up by me).

The latest news is that a bunch of military vets seem to be joining in the fad too? I’m not entirely sure yet what’s up with that, whether they have any demands or if they’re just innocently joining in a fun fitness activity. I’m definitely following all the latest news to see where this thing goes.