Chinese Traffic Culture: Pure Ugliness

Despite all the wonderful things about Chinese culture, there exists a dark side, and that is the behavior of people driving on the roads.

This ugliness and darkness cannot be avoided because one must take to the roads every day in order to get to work, go to places, meet people, socialize, etc. The daily chaos and unpleasantness on the roads is something that everybody hates, yet there is no choice but to take to the roads. What else are you going to do, ask Mr Spock to beam you up?

And so the thinking is to get the journey over with as quickly as possible, and arrive at the destination where life can go on as normal. This kind of mentality only leads to more chaos on the roads, since everybody wants to go quick, quick, quick and nobody has any patience.

This blog has no doubt made the point over the years that getting around in China is such a goddamn hassle. Transport is an incredibly big deal, and unnecessarily so. When it comes to convoluted methods to cross provincial borders, hire illegal taxis, or stockpile fuel in gas cans to ride scooters around the city, people will do just about anything unreasonable to get from Point A to B in a reasonable way.

And the high rate of accidents means that getting from Point A to B is never guaranteed.

Understandably, one can never relax on Chinese roads and tensions run high, regardless of what the mode of transportation is. However, road rage doesn't take the same form as we would have back in the US. In China, you're not going to have some guy screaming obscenities out the window, squealing tires, or pulling out his gun. But the absence of overt aggressive behavior doesn't mean that road rage doesn't exist.

Far from it.

Taxi drivers will routinely curse other drivers behind their own wheel with the windows rolled up. Nobody hears the curses, but they exist in the drivers' hearts. There is hatred on the roads. Drivers will routinely cut other drivers off and let out sighs of exasperation and frustration when someone else cuts them off. Or on the subway, they will push, shove, and force their way onto an overcrowded train when the doors are about to shut.

The biggest concern is when all this passive aggressive frustration explodes into a full-blown fight. This is a common scene during fender-bender accidents, when the parties will often get into an argument, a shouting match, and sometimes a fistfight with a crowd of gawping onlookers. If the police get involved, then it's game over if you happen to be a foreigner, because in this game of anarchy, the foreigner is always at fault.

Given all this nastiness of Chinese driving behavior, it's no wonder that I'm extra careful out there. But fear is an awesome motivator to avoid accidents. Every single tale I've heard about foreigners getting into accidents with Chinese locals ends on a negative note, and it reveals an incredibly vicious side to these locals that is worse than any accident.

To make a long story short then, you do not, I repeat do not even want to think about getting into an accident.