Return of the Scorcher

China As Seen From A Bicycle, The Bicycle As Seen From China

By Nathan Congdon

Photography by Tyler Bowa, www.peoplesbike.com

Critical Mass
China holds a lofty spot in the iconography of modern urban bicycle culture. The monthly bicycle demonstration cum spectacle “Critical Mass,” a fixture in cities all over the world, takes its name from a scene in Ted White’s classic “The Return of the Scorcher.” The film describes how bicycles in China in the 1980s would negotiate the problem of un-regulated intersections, gathering in swarms until they reached a “critical mass” and could seize the right of way over larger vehicles by sheer force of numbers.

The iconic shots of Chinese bicycle rivers in White’s film pale before the real thing. During my first trip to Beijing in winter 1983, pedalling a rented bike in my anonymous blue coat surrounded by thousands of similarly-dressed comrades, I felt very much a part of the critical masses as we churned Chang An Jie into a rush hour Yangtze. Any major Chinese city in those days had dedicated bicycle parking areas as large as a shopping mall lot, Flying Pigeons fender to fender as far as the eye could see. The few cars stood out as flag-decorated black islands in the blue-coated sea. Bicycles were near the top of the Chinese traffic food chain, their only natural predator being the city bus. Graphic, medically-detailed corpse shots of errant bicyclists and pedestrians protruding from beneath mammoth wheels were standard fare at bus-stops around the city, traffic safety propaganda that made up in persuasive power what it lacked in subtlety. Early settlers in America described flocks of Passenger Pigeons hundreds of miles long that would take hours to pass, barely seeming to notice the effects of salvos of buckshot. Similarly, the occasional depredations from bus tires failed to make headway against the torrent of 1980s Chinese bicyclists...

In Guangzhou 2010 where I ride these days, we bicyclists haven’t entirely gone the way of the Passenger Pigeon, but neither are we swashbuckling along near the