China is rapidly becoming a country on wheels and its crowded driving schools are racing to churn out licensed drivers as fast as cars roll off the assembly lines.
However, judging by the daily smash-ups and blatant disregard for even basic traffic rules on China’s roadways, quantity seems to have trumped quality at many schools.
China surpassed the US in 2009 to become the world’s largest auto market and just as newly affluent Chinese are snapping up expensive cars in staggering numbers, driving schools are bursting at the seams.
“There are so many trainees because everyone wants a driving license,” said Ren Xingzhou, an instructor at Fengshun Driving School in Beijing. “Driving used to be a profession in China — now it’s necessary living skill.”
According to official data, China granted 22.69 million driving licenses last year alone, bringing the total number of licensed drivers in the country to 236 million at the end of last year.
However, no amount of classroom work or simulated driving may prepare drivers for the roadways that more closely resemble slow-moving battle grounds than transportation arteries.
In 2010 alone, China reported 3.9 million road accidents that killed 65,225 people and injured 254,075. Lack of experience is often cited as a key reason behind the rocketing number of accidents.
In hopes of instilling some sense of order, Chinese law requires drivers to attend a driving school before passing a written test. As a result, thousands of driving schools, charging as much as 8,000 yuan (US$1,300), have mushroomed across Beijing, a city of about 20 million people that is already congested with about 5 million cars.
Fengshun driving school alone mints about 10,000 new drivers a year, running classes from 8am to 9pm, seven days a week.
Applicants must pass three tests to obtain a license. The first part is classroom training to make drivers aware of traffic rules. As hundreds of trainees listen, an instructor explains a textbook compiled by the traffic police.
A quiz of 100 questions follows, and trainees must provide correct answers to at least 90 before they can even get behind the wheel of the training vehicles.
“You don’t have to be a genius to pass, as long as you read the book the evening before the quiz,” said a company clerk, who claimed he skipped all the classroom lessons apart from the first one when fingerprints were required.
The second section — the main part of the training that requires at least 54 hours — is conducted on a paved proving ground that mimics actual roads and traffic signs, but lacks all of the hazards that make actual driving a challenge.
Hundreds of meters from the school, one of the city’s main roadways was packed with cars end-to-end on a recent winter’s day, a looming reminder to the school’s drivers of the world they will enter on graduation.
In each car — mostly Volkswagens at the Fengshun school — one instructor and one trainee sit side-by-side, practicing all the required skills, from parallel parking to driving through a 30-meter obstacle course of six yellow-painted sewer covers without touching any of them.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous. These covers are symbols of roadblocks, but which road would be so terrible as to have so many roadblocks, and even if there are so many roadblocks, which driver would be so crazy trying to pass them?” Ren asked, even as he put the students through the required exercise.
For trainees who pass the second test, including parking in the right position and starting the car on a steep slope, they will apply their new skills on public roads, where already-licensed drivers routinely make sudden lane changes without signaling, and where pedestrians unexpectedly dash across roadways whenever they see an opening.
Road training lasts for 10 hours where trainees are often bullied and horrified by Beijing’s infamously short-tempered drivers.
On a recent day, a young driver stopped and cursed one trainee whose car was moving too slowly.
“If he dared to get out of his vehicle, I would definitely teach him a lesson,” said Wu Liansheng, the training instructor.
Turning to his student drivers, Wu said: “Now remember, you don’t cross the line into others, but if someone else crosses into yours, you must fight back.”
It’s enough to make one nostalgic for simpler days when millions got around by bicycle.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not