As bike-sharing brings out bad manners, China questions its moral values

Beijing

LIU Lijing, a mechanic in Beijing, does not usually pay much attention to manners. He does not mind when people blast loud music, and he strolls the alleyways near his home in a tank top stained with grease. But when a stranger recently ditched a bicycle in the bushes outside his door, Mr Liu was irate.

Startups have flooded the city with shared bikes, he complained, and people have been leaving them all over the place without thinking about other residents. "There's no sense of decency anymore," he muttered, picking up the discarded bike and heaving it into the air in anger. "We treat each other like enemies."

There are now more than 16 million shared bicycles on the road in China's traffic-clogged cities, thanks to a fierce battle for market share among 70-plus companies backed by a total of more than US$1 billion in financing. These startups have reshaped the urban landscape, putting bikes equipped with GPS and dig…