Wang Junsheng prefers teaching kung fu but says teaching beginning drivers at the Flourishing China Driving School pays better.
By Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY
BEIJING — As a farmer's son growing up in England, I always thought I'd learn to drive in a field. Somehow it never happened. Until last month, near Bean Village in eastern Beijing, where at age 37, I began taking driving lessons.
My field of driving dreams is being eaten up in China's race to urbanize. The roads being paved through farm country at the fringes of China's capital are some of the most dangerous in the world.
"Thirty years ago, this was all fields and trees," reminisces traffic cop Li Baocheng as he drives through Beijing's eastern suburbs. He's worked here since 1974. "There were very few cars on the roads back then. My job was very relaxed."
Today Li's beat is a choking sprawl of factories and highways. Every day, 1,000 brand new drivers hit the city's streets, the Beijing environmental bureau says. "New drivers are my biggest headache," Li moans. "Some days I don't have time to eat. There's an accident every 10 minutes."
China has fallen in love with the car. Beijingers today enjoy better jobs and freer travel. More than 4 million of them — more than a quarter of the capital area's 15 million people — now carry driver's licenses. Their 2.7 million cars clog the capital's arteries, according to the 2006 Beijing Road Safety Exhibition.
China is the world's fastest-growing car market. Nationally, car sales leaped almost 50% to 1.8 million in the first half of 2006, the state Xinhua News Agency says. But the fallout is deadly: There were 99,000 auto-related fatalities last year, according to the Road Safety Exhibition. That made road accidents the No. 1 non-disease killer in the country, ahead of floods, fires and other disasters. China's 1.3 billion people own just 2% of the world's vehicles, but account for 15% of global traffic deaths, according to the Ministry of Communications.
Liu Xiaolei is unperturbed. "It will be easier to find a girlfriend if I can drive," says the 18-year-old. "All Chinese girls now want boyfriends who can drive."
To end his love drought, Liu has joined me and other beginners at Flourishing China Driving School in eastern Beijing. Most of the students here will emerge clutching their driver's licenses in just six weeks — without ever having left the compound to drive on real roads, which are packed with China's heedless, dare-to-die bicyclists and pedestrians. Hopefully, by then, this late starter will have a license, too.
My fellow students at Flourishing China are aghast: You're a 37-year-old Westerner and you can't drive?
The one person who does believe me is my instructor, Wang Junsheng, who as it happens is also a kung fu martial arts master from the home of flying fists, the famed Shaolin Temple in Henan province.
Wang, 27, says he would rather be teaching martial arts, but being a driving instructor pays better. "Get out!" he shouts frequently. So I exit the driver's seat of our shiny Hyundai Elantra.
"This is how you do it," Wang says, removing the brick he placed under the gas pedal to keep me from speeding.
In just 23 seconds, he screeches in and out of two parking spaces separated by slalom poles, this challenge being one of three on China's standardized driving test. Beginners like me can take as long as we like to make the maneuver. We're supposed to navigate the poles by using a scheme of colored dots placed on the rear window.
Many of China's drivers are the first in their families to get behind the wheel. Ten years ago, Chinese learners practiced by driving on ordinary streets. When numbers boomed, the government corralled them at schools like Flourishing China, a huge plot with 175 training vehicles and mock hazards.
Student drivers pay $380 for a 58-hour course. First, though, they must pass a tough online "theory" test on the rules of the road. Thanks to Wang, I'm now at the final stage — the "road" test, which, thankfully, takes place on the grounds of the driving school and not amid the mayhem on real Chinese roads.
That's the trouble, says red-faced taxi driver Zhang Chunqiu. "There are too many killers on the roads because people don't learn (to drive) on real roads," he says, swerving to avoid a cyclist who has stopped in the middle of an expressway to pick up plastic bottles.
Policeman Li says change is coming: Beijing will reintroduce genuine road tests at the end of the year. That will mean fewer accidents, he says — and more time for lunch.
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