[Carfreeliving] Class Warfare - Car-Owners versus everyone else

[Dave Snyder]

Courtesy of Charles Kalish:

Check out the growing class war worldwide between those with autos 
and those without:

Worldwide


Between Those With Autos and Those Without


Editor's Note: In China and elsewhere around the globe, the 
automobile is being attacked as a symbol of inequality.

By Philip Cunningham
HYPERLINK "http://news.ncmonline.com/"NCM Ethnic Media Nationwide


September 23, 2005


BEIJING -- The world is quickly being split into two hostile camps: 
those with cars, and those without. Nowhere is this division more 
apparent than in this city of 14 million people, where cars are 
pushing bicycles onto the sidewalk and people up against the wall.

In China, the last big country nominally dedicated to the idea of 
social and economic equality, the onslaught of the auto has been 
particularly vexing. If Chinese were to enjoy access to automobiles 
on par with Americans, it would deplete the world's known oil 
reserves while turning rice fields into parking lots. China Daily 
recently opined, "In Beijing, some 4 million bikes now compete for 
road space with more than 2 million cars, and a quick glance at the 
newly widened boulevards, overpasses and ring roads of the capital 
clearly shows which means of transport has been getting priority."

Meanwhile in the vast Chinese countryside, inequity and inequality 
increasingly find expression in riots, flash demonstrations and 
pitched battles. Such violent venting contributed to the staggering 
total of 70,000 "mass disturbances" reported to have taken place 
across China's vast hinterland last year. In the small fraction of 
incidents that get reported, one can detect a pattern: Cars are 
increasingly being targeted by the poor and put-upon.

In a village in Zhejiang province, residents destroyed more than 60 
cars in April. In July in Chizhou, in Anhui province, a mob of 10,000 
flipped, smashed and torched three police cars and a Toyota sedan 
after the sedan collided with a bicyclist. Elsewhere across China, 
workers protesting low wages have blocked highways, disrupting 
traffic for hours.

The sparks of the violence vary. Sometimes an anti-auto rampage is 
directly linked to the dangers of metal in motion -- the reckless 
swiping of a pedestrian, or the killing of a student on his way to 
school. Sometimes the protest is about unpaid wages or layoffs, or a 
profit-driven power station that poisons ancestral farmlands. Often 
the hapless automobile represents privilege and inequality. But 
whenever the collective anger gets out of control, "smash, burn and 
overturn" seems to be the unofficial motto.

Beijing is not alone in trying to juggle the rapid growth of 
automobile lifestyle with traffic safety, environmental concerns, 
social inequality and respect for the pedestrian. A melee in Belfast 
leaves 10 cars over-turned and a double-decker bus trashed; road rage 
in the United States results in gunshots and crack-ups; and kids in 
Third-world shantytowns who have yet to sit on the upholstery inside 
a car gleefully scrape the paint off shiny exteriors. Photographer 
Philip Blenkinsop has graphically chronicled the downside of 
automotive life in "The Cars That Ate Bangkok," a stark 
black-and-white record of road kill and collateral damage in Thailand.

Nor is anger over auto issues unknown in the land that, more than any 
other, has championed the automobile. In the United States, tens of 
thousands die annually in traffic accidents, a toll that would be 
politically unacceptable in the war on terror. The gas-guzzling SUV 
is so menacing it gives the economy-car driving American a whiff of 
what it's like to be poor in China. Cars demarcate class in America 
also, as the uneven evacuation of residents of New Orleans and 
surrounding areas before Hurricane Katrina so emphatically showed.

But it is in U.S. military-occupied Iraq where people hurting cars 
and cars hurting people reaches truly nightmarish proportions, where 
gas-guzzlers are both target and delivery device, to bomb or be 
bombed. Even those who ride in SUVs or armored limos a safe distance 
from the battlefields of Iraq must kowtow to the realities of oil 
slavery. Witness the obsequious smiles on the faces of Vice President 
Dick Cheney, former President Bush and Colin Powell when they 
recently paid their respects to the new Saudi king, guardian of the 
world's biggest oil fields.

Call it resentment, or call it the first cries of an as yet 
unarticulated "Car-munist" manifesto. The world is witnessing the 
growth of a rag-tag movement, spontaneous and combustible, as those 
without cars fight iniquities, real and imagined, created by 
oil-burning, smoke-belching autos.

Philip J. Cunningham is a Beijing-based writer and political commentator.



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