As it is in India, in China, too, social media sometimes forces the authorities to acknowledge their failures. A viral video showing e-bikes being driven by teenagers through a hospital’s corridors last week forced a statement from the local health authorities. It even created enough of a furore for the ultra-nationalist official news outlet Global Times to mention it. Typically though, the outlet carried only the official response; it didn’t bother to interview patients, including the 16-year-old whose friends, after dropping in on him, decided to make an unusual reel out of this visit.
The health department promised to make the hospital improve its security measures. Does that promise mean anything? Over the last decade, doctors have often been attacked inside hospitals. This is despite China enacting a new law in 2020 that enhanced punishments for those attacking doctors. Last year, a cardiologist working in the outpatient department of a medical university in Wenzhou was fatally stabbed by the relative of a patient he had treated; the assailant then jumped off the terrace of a nearby building. The cardiologist was known to be a workaholic.
An ophthalmologist stabbed in 2020 was luckier — he survived the attack and could go back to work, though after a long gap of four years. This incident took place in a top hospital in the capital and hence was widely reported. The young doctor was left severely wounded in his skull, back, left hand and right arm; nobody thought he could perform surgery again. However, in a rare display of determination, the doctor continued seeing patients online and finally was back to holding a scalpel after four years. His assailant received a suspended death sentence.
After this case, there was talk about hospitals installing metal detectors, but few did, sceptical about how effective they would be given the large footfall.
How seriously the authorities deal with such incidents can be seen from one example: last year, two people died and as many as 21 were injured when a man stabbed people at random in a hospital in Yunnan. But apart from the bare facts, nothing else was reported about this shocking incident.
While the latest breach of hospital security didn’t hurt any patient, the obvious lack of security measures in the hospital has left everyone stunned. How could these youngsters zip through the hospital corridors without anyone stopping them?
This incident illustrates vividly why e-bikers are hated by the authorities in China’s major metros. Notorious for their disregard for traffic rules: suddenly changing lanes, over-speeding, even driving on the wrong side, they are the biggest cause of accidents in China. Bus drivers describe them as “locusts”. In fact, in 2016, all major cities banned the use of e-bikes on highways and main thoroughfares.
However, these bikes are also the preferred mode of transport for the working class, many of whom do not live close to bus and subway lines. One university campus tried to ban them but the outcry from students and professors forced it to revoke the ban. The booming e-commerce economy is also dependent on them. Ten years back, Shenzhen’s traffic police were notorious for confiscating e-bikes. Today, this city, with a population of 18 million and limited road space, realising that this popular mode of transport cannot be banned completely, has started building bike lanes, urging cars to “sacrifice a lane”. Ironically, under Mao Zedong and long after him too, the humble bicycle was the preferred mode of transport in China. Today, this “communist” superpower, the world’s biggest producer and consumer of e-bikes, promotes ‘green’ electric cars on its roads but discourages ‘green’ e-bikes.