Car Trouble -- Tension Grows Worldwide Between Those With Autos and Those Without

Suppose if I *really* wanted to start car trouble, I'd x-post this
article to aus.cars ...

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Car Trouble -- Tension Grows Worldwide Between Those With Autos and
Those Without
http://tinyurl.com/a3sqj

New America Media, Commentary, Philip Cunningham, Sep 23, 2005

Editor's Note: In China and elsewhere around the globe, the automobile
is being attacked as a symbol of inequality.

BEIJING--The world is quickly being split into two hostile camps: those
with cars, and those without. Nowhere is this division more apparent
than in this city of 14 million people, where cars are pushing bicycles
onto the sidewalk and people up against the wall.

In China, the last big country nominally dedicated to the idea of
social and economic equality, the onslaught of the auto has been
particularly vexing. If Chinese were to enjoy access to automobiles on
par with Americans, it would deplete the world's known oil reserves
while turning rice fields into parking lots. China Daily recently
opined, "In Beijing, some 4 million bikes now compete for road space
with more than 2 million cars, and a quick glance at the newly widened
boulevards, overpasses and ring roads of the capital clearly shows
which means of transport has been getting priority."

Meanwhile in the vast Chinese countryside, inequity and inequality
increasingly find expression in riots, flash demonstrations and pitched
battles. Such violent venting contributed to the staggering total of
70,000 "mass disturbances" reported to have taken place across China's
vast hinterland last year. In the small fraction of incidents that get
reported, one can detect a pattern: Cars are increasingly being
targeted by the poor and put-upon.

In a village in Zhejiang province, residents destroyed more than 60
cars in April. In July in Chizhou, in Anhui province, a mob of 10,000
flipped, smashed and torched three police cars and a Toyota sedan after
the sedan collided with a bicyclist. Elsewhere across China, workers
protesting low wages have blocked highways, disrupting traffic for
hours.

The sparks of the violence vary. Sometimes an anti-auto rampage is
directly linked to the dangers of metal in motion -- the reckless
swiping of a pedestrian, or the killing of a student on his way to
school. Sometimes the protest is about unpaid wages or layoffs, or a
profit-driven power station that poisons ancestral farmlands. Often the
hapless automobile represents privilege and inequality. But whenever the
collective anger gets out of control, "smash, burn and overturn" seems
to be the unofficial motto.

Beijing is not alone in trying to juggle the rapid growth of automobile
lifestyle with traffic safety, environmental concerns, social inequality
and respect for the pedestrian. A melee in Belfast leaves 10 cars
over-turned and a double-decker bus trashed; road rage in the United
States results in gunshots and crack-ups; and kids in Third-world
shantytowns who have yet to sit on the upholstery inside a car
gleefully scrape the paint off shiny exteriors. Photographer Philip
Blenkinsop has graphically chronicled the downside of automotive life
in "The Cars That Ate Bangkok," a stark black-and-white record of road
kill and collateral damage in Thailand.

Nor is anger over auto issues unknown in the land that, more than any
other, has championed the automobile. In the United States, tens of
thousands die annually in traffic accidents, a toll that would be
politically unacceptable in the war on terror. The gas-guzzling SUV is
so menacing it gives the economy-car driving American a whiff of what
it's like to be poor in China. Cars demarcate class in America also, as
the uneven evacuation of residents of New Orleans and surrounding areas
before Hurricane Katrina so emphatically showed.

But it is in U.S. military-occupied Iraq where people hurting cars and
cars hurting people reaches truly nightmarish proportions, where
gas-guzzlers are both target and delivery device, to bomb or be bombed.
Even those who ride in SUVs or armored limos a safe distance from the
battlefields of Iraq must kowtow to the realities of oil slavery.
Witness the obsequious smiles on the faces of Vice President Dick
Cheney, former President Bush and Colin Powell when they recently paid
their respects to the new Saudi king, guardian of the world's biggest
oil fields.

Call it resentment, or call it the first cries of an as yet
unarticulated "Car-munist" manifesto. The world is witnessing the
growth of a rag-tag movement, spontaneous and combustible, as those
without cars fight iniquities, real and imagined, created by
oil-burning, smoke-belching autos.

Philip J. Cunningham is a Beijing-based writer and political
commentator.


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cfsmtb

cfsmtb Wrote:

In a village in Zhejiang province, residents destroyed more than 60
cars in April. In July in Chizhou, in Anhui province, a mob of 10,000
flipped, smashed and torched three police cars and a Toyota sedan after
the sedan collided with a bicyclist. Elsewhere across China, workers
protesting low wages have blocked highways, disrupting traffic for
hours.


we have so much to learn from them


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endroll

endroll Wrote:
we have so much to learn from them

How ironic - in developed economies, traffic delays workers for hours.

Ritch


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ritcho