We have said it before, we will say it again: the Chinese Dictatorship and the Chinese people who have benefited in large part from its absorption of Western capitalist investments over the last forty years have grown so maniacally greedy and nationalistic as to pose the gravest threat to human democracy and enlightenment this sorry Earth has ever seen. It is simply pathetically outrageous when it is not lunatically absurd to insist on drawing a distinction between Dictatorships and "the people". Ain't no such thing! The Chinese people are accomplices and abettors in the attempt to populate the planet with a culture that is bestial at best and astronomically destructive and insane at worst.
We shall have no peace until this imminent threat is defeated, and we shall apply every fibre of our being to defeat the new Huns of the 21st Century - the Han Chinese!
WANGQINGTUO, China — This
farm grows bikes, by the looks of it. Hundreds of blue and mint-green bicycles
stand in rows on this field in Wangqingtuo, the small community that calls
itself “bicycle town.” Only the occasional caretaker and a pen of bleating goats
watch over them as they rust.
Just a
year ago, global investors were throwing money at Chinese companies that rented
those bicycles to consumers. Bicycle start-ups became “unicorns,” or new
companies worth more than $1 billion. This town, home to factories that made
many of the bikes, prospered.
Now the boom has become China’s latest investment bust. Too many
bikes litter the streets of Chinese cities. Some start-ups hit financial
trouble. Wangqingtuo now has closed factories, a work force that’s leaving and
too many bikes.
“They
came very quickly,” Ye Rongqing, who runs a business in town painting bicycle
frames, said of the start-ups, “and they left very quickly.”
Booms
and busts punctuate the Chinese internet scene in a way that even Silicon
Valley would see as extreme. From shopping to ride sharing to bike sharing and even truck sharing,
deep-pocketed investors have turned new businesses into billion-dollar
companies in a matter of months. Last year, China minted a new unicorn roughly
every four days, according to Hurun, a research firm in Shanghai.
“You
had investors that were after the next big thing or afraid of missing it,” said
Dan Wang, an analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm.
Then
many collapsed. While thriving new industries are created and many investors
profit, the flameouts still take a toll. Small investors and suppliers can be
wiped out. Customers lose money or start paying higher prices. Workers lose
jobs.
Bike-sharing swept
through Chinese cities over three short years, giving millions of commuters a
way to get from the subway stop to the office. Today there are more than 23
million of these bikes on the streets of major Chinese cities like Beijing and
Shanghai, according to the firm iiMedia Research.
Unlike bikes with sharing
services in New York and other places, Chinese bikes didn’t need to be parked
in a dock. Instead, each bike had its own lock that could be unfastened with a
smartphone app. Politicians trying to tackle nasty pollution and urban
congestion problems found them especially appealing.
Billions of dollars in venture capital
money flooded in, creating opportunities for other entrepreneurs to copy. Soon
there were too many bikes. Instead of consolidating, more start-ups cropped up.
The start-ups, focused on growth, charged riders little or
nothing. Mobike, one of the companies, still charges around 20 cents for a
30-minute ride.
“Even the companies that grew so big
still haven’t figured out how to make money,” said Fu Yifu, a researcher with
Suning Financial Research Institute, an organization attached to a Chinese
internet finance company.
Bikes in every color of the rainbow
were made in Wangqingtuo and shipped to cities near and far. Yellow bikes
became synonymous with Ofo, orange bikes with Mobike, blue
with Bluegogo.
Wangqingtuo, which began putting
together two-wheeled rides in the 1970s, became a bicycle hub during China’s
economic rise, the way other places became centers for making lighters or
zippers. A sign at the town entrance proclaims, “China’s bicycle industrial
base: Wangqingtuo welcomes you.” It suffered as increasingly affluent Chinese
turned to cars and scooters, and it turned to making bicycles for other
countries.
Then
the bike-sharing boom hit. The Shanghai Phoenix Bicycle factory in
town took on so many orders for Ofo’s bright yellow and black bikes that by
2017 it was churning out 10,000 bikes a day, according to Gao Yuntian, an
employee from Shanghai. Most, he said, were for Ofo.
Then money slowed.
Then money slowed.
Ofo “had ordered so much that they
started to have problems with a cash squeeze,” Mr. Gao said. “Then they paid us
less and less.”
Ofo,
which has faced a flood of demands from customers who want their deposits back,
says it has been hit by industrywide problems. “Under such circumstances, Ofo
is one of the few companies in the industry that still strives to survive on
its own,” Scarlett Zhao, a spokeswoman for Ofo, wrote in an email.
New apartments, built during the bike-sharing boom, sit unoccupied
in Wangqingtuo.
Fan Duan, who moved to
Wangqingtuo in 2014 to lead the sales department of a bike company, had his own
run-in with Ofo. Leigesasi, Mr. Fan’s company, began making Ofo bikes in early
2016. But soon Ofo got big and wanted more.
“They
started to demand deliver first and pay later. We stopped
manufacturing for Ofo,” Mr. Fan said.
By
2017, things started to go wrong. Factories were making so many bikes that
there was a surplus. Some start-ups could no longer pay for their orders.
Bluegogo,
China’s third-largest bike-share company, went bankrupt in November 2017. A
year later, Ofo suddenly faced mounting financial pressures. Its founder was
placed on a government blacklist for a growing pile of unpaid bills. Riders
lined up to collect their $15 to $30 in deposits each.
Ofo
will “be responsible to our users and responsible for every debt,” Ms. Zhao
wrote.
Many factories in Wangqingtuo were forced to sell their bikes at
big discounts, according to Mr. Ye, who runs the frame-painting business. It
set off a domino effect. Bike suppliers tried to sell unwanted orders of
bicycles, finding limited success because the specifications were often
particular to a company’s design.
From
there, the town’s bike factories had little chance of recovering. “To put it in
one sentence,” said Zhang Yi, chief analyst at iiMedia Research, “it
really messed up the bike factories.”
Today,
parts of Wangqingtuo look like a ghost town. Many factories are locked tight,
and the signs that once showed their names and specialties have been removed. Storefronts
stand empty on the street where many of the bike factories used to run shops. A
stack of bicycle wheels sits beside a storefront. Nearby, someone has piled
unwanted bicycle forks in a haphazard row.
“I am
going back home for Chinese New Year,” read a sign written on the metal garage
door of one empty factory. “Will restart on the 18th of Chinese New Year,” it
said, referring to Feb. 22. More than a month later, the person had yet to
return.
The bicycle manufacturer Tianjin Fuji-ta Group managed
to stay in business. When its factory started working with bike-sharing
start-ups like Ofo and Hello Bike in late 2016, it took around 400,000 orders.
The next year, that number jumped to eight million.
The orders have since halved again, but Fuji-ta is still
working with start-ups that survived the industry culling.
Some in town are
still looking for the silver lining. In recent months, Mobike and Bluegogo,
which Didi took over last year, have raised prices.
“This
is in order to go back to market prices,” said Mr. Zhang, who believes that
this could mean “a second spring” for sharing bikes.
Fang Hui, a 25-year-old from Wangqingtuo
who makes bikes and sells them online, recently bought hundreds of yellow Ofo
bike frames. On a recent visit, they were stacked in a pile on the floor of his
makeshift factory. He paid just over $2 for each one, and he said he planned to
find a way to put them to use.
Mr. Fang recalled how much his hometown had
changed in the past few years. During the boom, delivery trucks caused daily
traffic jams, he said, and factories couldn’t get enough workers.
“Before, there were
many people coming from outside this town to work here,” Mr. Fang said, adding,
“We seldom see anyone from outside anymore.”
Alexandra
Stevenson is a business correspondent based in Hong Kong, covering Chinese
corporate giants, the changing landscape for multinational companies and
China’s growing economic and financial influence in Asia.