I had another of those near-death experiences last night. I was leaving the Sanlitun bar district with a few friends after a nice farewell dinner and drinks for the visiting sister of one of them (it wasn't even particularly late - single mums with babysitters to relieve!). We were having to walk a few hundred yards to a major road to find a cab. The road we were on was fairly well-lit, but narrow, and - as so often in this town - it didn't have much of a usable sidewalk because of the massive obstructions of trees and telegraph poles planted in the middle of it.
Car drivers, knowing that this is adjacent to the teeming bar zone, and that people have no choice but to walk on the road, should anticipate the likelihood of pedestrians - often, indeed, large crowds of less than fully attentive pedestrians - blocking their path. This is not a stretch of road that cars should be driving along at 11 at night at 40+mph.
The bastard didn't even honk his horn or flash his lights. We heard his engine behind us, heard the tyres on the road approaching stupidly quickly. My companions instantly scattered to safety. I, on the other hand, spun around to fix the driver with my most baleful stare, and obstinately held my position in the middle of the road. I admit, I do play 'chicken' like this quite a lot. I almost always win. However reckless and incompetent Beijing drivers may be, they do have some slight instinct of self-preservation and they know that killing a foreigner would be very, very bad for them. Unless they're one of the black Audi brigade, of course; in which case, they can pretty much get away with anything. Well, this guy wasn't in a black Audi, but he was approaching so fast that I didn't really have much opportunity of getting out of his way if he didn't manage to find his brake pedal.
He braked - very late and very hard. His car nearly touched me, only finally coming to a stop an inch or two off my shins. I don't believe his car control is anything near good enough to have judged it that finely. He just got lucky. Very lucky. So did I. It was a sickening, terrifying moment.
My adrenalin levels, naturally, were through the roof. I vented by yelling obscenities and flicking the finger at him. I considered - as I have done once or twice in similar incidents in the past - pounding on his bonnet (that's the 'hood' to you, my Yankee friends), or kicking out at his bumper or headlamps.... but I refrained from this, being somehow still rational enough to realise that I didn't want to risk provoking an ugly escalation of the confrontation in front of my female companions.
The guy was glaring at me and revving his engine impatiently. He was off again the instant I started to move aside, and almost creased me with his rear end as he swung into a left turn. I was again tempted to aim a kick at his doors, but again relented - contenting myself with a loud slap of the flat of the hand against a window. This time it was his turn to stop and hurl obscenities at me.
We exchanged psycho stares for a few moments through his open passenger side window. I out-psycho-ed him and he drove off. I'd always been pretty confident he wouldn't actually get out of the car to start a fight. (I was much bigger than him; and there's a strong vein of physical cowardice in most of the Chinese - they'll yell a lot, but they won't often come to blows. Not unless they can take you by surprise with a brick or a bottle. That's a topic for another post, perhaps.) He may even have had some instinctual awareness that the fact that I had women to 'protect' - or show off in front of - would be likely to make me a more formidable opponent (that's not particularly a facet of my personality, just universal human nature).
There was a danger, though, that he would come after me in the car. I've had that happen to me a couple of times. (Again, perhaps, a topic for a later post.)
Fortunately, he disappeared into the night, and we were soon able to put the unfortunate encounter from our minds.
Sadly, this is a pretty routine event in China, and particularly in Beijing. Standards of driving are just appalling. People don't follow the rules of the road. People don't know how to control their cars (a nation of bike-riders who don't like to use their brakes is slowly becoming a nation of car-drivers who don't use their brakes). People don't have any basic sense of road safety. People drive too fast. People drive aggressively. People drive drunk. People drive with feeble, uncorrected vision. Official road death figures are in excess of 100,000 per year, and the WHO speculates that there is probably massive under-reporting. Even so, it's a little over 10% of the worldwide total.
My one-man campaign to defy and challenge arsehole drivers whenever I meet them is going to get me into big trouble one day, I know.
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