Cup of Cha
This is China

There’s a little game I play when I get into taxis in Beijing. I always take a look at their registration numbers to get a sense of how long they’ve been on the job. The lower the number, the longer they’ve been working (although I discovered that this only started about 12 years ago, so numbers below 50,000 are non-sequential).

Today I hopped into a taxi and saw the number was below 50,000, so I asked him how long he had been driving. He told me 30 years, but I realized he was low-balling the number since he actually began in 1973. He began when the Cultural Revolution was still raging, although we didn’t have a chance to discuss that. What he did tell me, was that at the time he made 40 RMB a month. I asked him if that was a good salary at the time, and he assured me most people only earned about 30/month, so he was doing quite well then.

I did a little bit of research and discovered that exchange rate was 1.99:1, RMB to US Dollars in 1973, so in theory he was making about $80 per month. Of course it is difficult to know what that really means since the economy was not open, but if anything the Yuan was significantly overvalued at the time. He chuckled at the fact that a driver can now make 5,000RMB or more a month, but that it is no longer considered much money.

One of the interesting things about taxi drivers in Beijing is that they are increasingly from the suburbs, often quite far from the city. There is a requirement that cabbies must have been born in Beijing, but that means the political area, not the real city boundaries. As the economy has grown and economic opportunities have increased, driving a taxi, once a lucrative job, has become less desirable. Fewer people from the city proper have an interest in what is now considered a mediocre job, and the drivers often come from far away with poor knowledge of the city.

Another byproduct of the suburbanization of the cab driver pool has been that they tend to have less interesting personalities. Beijing drivers were once known as lively characters never short on opinions, but with each passing year it is harder to find people who fit this once prevalent stereotype.

The driver I had, with 35 years on the job, talked to me mostly about America, asking me if it was as cold there as in Beijing, and telling me that most Chinese want to move to America. He conceded that far fewer want to go now than before, and despite the fact that he had no interest in going himself (”there are no television shows for me to watch there”) was insistent that most of his country mates differ from him. He told me, “When you’re young you want to go everywhere and see everything. But I’m too old for that.”

Unfortunately for me the cab ride was short, as I really wanted to hear more about how he became a cab driver at a time when Beijing had almost no cars, but alas, we got to our destination fairly quickly. I asked him for a business card, hoping that perhaps he had one, like many of his younger counterparts from the suburbs. He put up his hands and said, “I don’t have any business cards, I’m just a cab driver.”

Tags: beijing cabs, cultural revolution
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