Biking Hohhot, Air Quality, the Hiearchy of the Streets

One of the great joys of living in Hohhot for the last two months has been biking around the city. At the beginning of our second week here, I went with my American colleague Tyler--an avid cyclist who is also fluent in Mandarin--to purchase three bikes at the "Merida" bike shop, a small and crowded storefront in an alleyway only accessible to those in the know.

Tyler (right) and the owner of the Merida Bike Shop in Hohhot. Yeah, Tyler is a buffed dude. He can ride me into the ground. Of course, he’s also 25, and a former baseball player at Oklahoma State University.

I couldn't resist. While I could have purchased heavy, steel-framed Chinese bicycles for about $25 each, at the Merida store I was able to buy sleek, light-weight, aluminum-framed Taiwanese-made bikes that are a pleasure to ride. In a city filled with bikes, ours stand out like double-humped camels at the mall--not that we didn't stand out before. (I apologize for the bad metaphor, but have you ever seen double-humped camels at the mall?) It is a sight to behold, four waigoren on mountain bikes, clad in colorful helmets (we are the ONLY people I've seen besides Tyler and his road-biking buddies to wear helmets), weaving through the throngs of old bikes and makeshift bicycle wagons, not to mention the trucks, taxis, and donkey-carts.

One of the shadier and prettier bike lanes in Hohhot. ALL the main streets have bike lanes, making Hohhot a biker’s dream.

Biking is really the only way to go in Hohhot. Hohhot, in fact, is a biker's paradise. Every street has a bike lane, including very large boulevards that slice through the central business district. If streets do not have a special biking lane, then the far right-hand lane is generally given over to bikes, if only because bikers here have the power of numbers, unlike the U.S. where they are an embattled minority. I can ride my bike anywhere in the entire city, joined by tens of thousands of other bikers, from school kids to grandmothers.

Biking has allowed me--and the rest of the family--to get around Hohhot without paying taxi fare, suffering over-crowded buses, or battling traffic congestion. It has also allowed me to the see the city in unique ways and gain perspectives that would have eluded me from the rear-seat of a taxi cab.

The Air Quality

Before coming to China, I didn't picture that I would be exercising so much outdoors. If anything, I figured that air pollution from vehicles, coal-burning furnaces, and smog-belching factories would resign me to doing calisthenics in my apartment building.

A reporter for the New York Times has written that air pollution levels in China “now point to disaster.” According to Chinese statistics, 400,000 people “die prematurely every year in China from diseases linked to air pollution,” which “is so thick,” the author says, “that on the worst days doctors advise…against going outside.” [Jim Yardley, “China’s Next Big Boom Could Be the Foul Air, 30 October 2005].

Expecting the worst, I was pleased to see that the air quality was not so terrible here in Hohhot. The first week, in fact, was pretty good, with thunder showers clearing the air almost every day. During our second week it began thickening up, but we didn't have our first really bad air day until mid-August, when I wrote this in my journal:

"The air was thick and hot today and smog hung thick over the city. Tonight everyone is complaining of sore throats, even Arienne. I've been riding my bike in the mornings, but I'm feeling a little poisoned right now. The air doesn't seem any heavier or darker than LA, but there are elements in it that seem less refined, more acidic. Don't know if it’s from those huge tractors and trucks with absolutely NO pollution controls, or from nearby factories."

It was during that week that we visited Helin, one hour south of the city where the air is fresh, that we became acutely aware of the poor air-quality in Hohhot. Upon our return, we drove smack into a palpable smog bank. When you're in it, you don't notice it, but when you leave it, you can see it on reentry, similar to descending out of the clear blue ether into Los Angeles on a summer afternoon.

Having lived in LA for close to ten years, I'm used to smog. But there's a deeper, riper, fuller quality to the air here. It's like the contrast between Kraft cheese and stinky French brie. Or, to use a wine metaphor, we might say that the air here has a full-bodied depth, a rich bouquet. There is a heavy, diesel-laden aftertaste to the smog, accompanied by a superior thickness that I never experienced in Los Angeles.

And yet, Tyler has been here for three years. He rides through the city all the time and claims that he's had no breathing problems. He thinks the air here is probably much better than LA (which, according the U.S. EPA, can trace nearly 25 percent of its air pollution to China!). And he's right: the air is not so bad, or at least not worse than most large cities in the world (1.5 million). As summer has given way to fall, we've had some stunning days with clear-blue skies that remind me of the clearest days in Seattle or the Tri-Cities.

That’s me mountain biking on the bluest, clearest day of the fall so far, with mountains clearly etched in the background.

On June 6, the China Daily reported that the "pollution picture in China" is beginning to "brighten," with sulfur dioxide emissions falling and other indexes following. "With the country installing more pollution control facilities and stepping up economic restructuring and policy enforcement, there will be a further drop" in pollution, says Zhang Lijun, the vice-minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration. China, he contends, has reached a "turning point." So, who do you believe: the New York Times, the China Daily, or Dave Arnold?

The Hierarchy of the Streets

Beyond experiencing the air quality first hand and with both lungs, biking has allowed me to become an urban sociologist on wheels. From my apartment, you can ride in five minutes to the Beijing Hualian, a large modern supermarket adjacent to a KFC. Five more minutes down the street and you are in squalid conditions: small shops and noodle stands line dirt streets, the stench of the sewer permeates everything and stagnant mud puddles look like they could kill.

This shop and KFC are 1/2 mile and a world apart.

Beyond simply the difference in wealth from one neighborhood to the next (no different from any other city in the world), one of the most palpable expressions of inequality in Hohhot, especially noticeable from the vantage point of a bicycle, is the hierarchy of the streets. The streets here are not democratic--every car, every person, every bike, is NOT created equal. The laws of the roadway do not apply equally to all vehicles and the persons they contain. Example: If you are a high government official or a rich capitalist in a black luxury sedan, you can go wherever the hell you want to go (meaning through red-lights or the wrong way down streets or sidewalks), and everyone else be damned. Seriously. No joke. If you have a donkey cart or a bicycle you better get out of their way, even if you have the green light and they have the red. They have the right to go anywhere. The same is true with official vehicles of any kind. I have come to the conclusion that police cars are primarily used to navigate Hohhot traffic in privileged ways. Example: need to get your kid to school on time during rush hour? Hop in your police car, flip on the lights, drive the wrong-way down the sidewalk and deliver your child to school. I've seen this happen many a time at the school beside our apartment.

So biking has been a rich experience that we've all enjoyed daily--and not just because it lets me practice my amateur street sociology with a degree of mobility (always good when spying on the natives). I'm also training so that I can keep up with my CBC colleague Paul Meier (aka Ironman Paul) upon my return, and absolutely crush my old pals Phil Minehan and Tom Mertes.

Going to Datong this week during the National Day holiday. Should be interesting. Report forthcoming (although Arienne's blog is probably better on the day to day stuff!)

Thanks for reading.

Dave