Weibo/ @Beijing legal migrant workers
In Kaifeng, bicycles already “clog” the road.
Zhengzhou police are closing bike lanes, preventing tens of thousands of students from cycling at night. It started as a harmless fad, but it opened old wounds in the Communist Party.
They cycle around 30 kilometers daily, crossing the cold night from the city of Zhengzhou, in Henan province, towards Kaifeng, on rented bicycles, says .
It’s the new Chinese fashion, popular among young university students. There are tens of thousands of young men and women who are already paralyzing interurban traffic, while piles of discarded bicycles flooded the streets of Kaifeng, leaving even some workers struggling to find bicycles to return home.
This is how the authorities justify their attempts to prevent the game from continuing: have controlled traffic, closed cycle paths and even imposed, in the case of some universities, that this practice is absolutely prohibited.
During this weekend, authorities in Kaifeng and Zhengzhou closed the bicycle lanes, on an avenue that connects the two cities, to try to prevent cyclists from entering.
At the same time, three bike-sharing platforms in Zhengzhou wrote a warning that their bikes will be automatically locked if they are driven outside the city.
The trend started on “Chinese TikTok”, Douyin, in June this yearwhen four university students from Zhengzhou decided to travel by bicycle to Kaifeng to satisfy a late-night craving for Xiaolongbao, a typical Chinese sweet.
On June 4th female college students cycled 50km from to to try the city’s breakfast specialty, soup dumplings. Their 4-hour journey gained attention on social media, celebrated as an expression of “youth, passion, vitality”. [🧵]
— Cycling Professor 🚲 (@fietsprofessor)
Eager to attract more tourists and take advantage of its newfound Internet fame, the city of Kaifeng has done everything in its power to welcome students, including offering free entry to tourist websites. The authorities seemed pleased to be able to combine all this with environmental sustainability.
The practice went viral in such a way that it even ended up giving rise to a movement of tens of thousands of students every nightwho published videos on the Internet with the hashtag “passion of youth”.
The practice even seemed to correspond to an original ideal of the Communist Party: unity. “I met many people like me along the way — some carried flags, others listened to music and some sang together“, a Henan University student told .
“When we got to a climb, everyone got excited. We didn’t know each other, but we felt like comrades“, he added.
Many of them even displayed Chinese flags, sang the national anthem or shout slogans in support of the Communist Party — one of them even waved a banner demanding unification with Taiwan, says CNN.
What they didn’t remember — perhaps because they didn’t experience it — was that some of the main revolts that occurred in China in recent decades they have been organized by young people. On bicycles.
CNN recalls a well-known episode dating back to 1989, when Beijing university students rode bicycles to the Square to join pro-democracy protests that ended in a bloody repression by the Chinese military.
Also in 2022 were essentially young people who took to the streets (or university campuses) in the main Chinese cities to protest against the strict restrictions imposed by leader Xi Jinping to Covid-19, in one of the most extraordinary challenges to the Communist Party in decades.
Repressed or not, young people seem to need a escape the reality in which they live. To the state-owned newspaper West China City Daily, some even said: “At that moment, I wished I could continue cycling and never return to reality”.
