Ok I’ll admit most people I talk to about LimeBikes–Greensboro’s bike share program- really like it–download the app, grab ’em anywhere, ditch ’em anywhere. And I know they’ll be popular during next weekend’s National Folk Festival as festivalists seek to get to quickly get from downtown stages to their parked cars.
Full disclosure— I’m a semi-serious cyclist) who handles his bike with care— and it bothers me to see all these green bikes sitting anywhere and anywhere–in the middle of sidewalks and parking lots and along the side of the road. And it really bothered me to see a bunch of then sitting out in the rain last Friday. But short of outright criticizing LimeBike rider, I’ll just lament their low suzhi, apparently a common problem in China, where more than 16 million shared bikes are on the streets:
Liu Lijing, a mechanic in Beijing, does not usually pay much attention to manners. He does not mind when people blast loud 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, Mr. Liu was irate.
Start-ups 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.”
…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, when the famed writer Lu Xun assailed Chinese culture as selfish, boastful, servile and cruel.
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.
No matter how much I dislike low suzhi, I promise not to become one of the “angry and mischievous vandals” who hang bikes in trees, bury them in construction sites and throw them lakes and rivers.
