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."