Traffic education with Chinese characteristics

Poster at a Chinese motorway service area :: © Heike Schmidbauer

Over the years, the Chinese nanny state has formulated a whole lot of dos and don'ts for its seemingly unmanageable population: 'Don't spit', 'don't litter', 'don't hang out the washing in the streets', 'don't wander around in your pyjamas in public', 'don't swear', 'queue in an orderly manner', 'behave yourself in foreign countries', 'love party and nation'.

The list could go on forever. And in its overall desire to produce civilized model citizens, the party-state certainly does not shy away from drastic actions.

This is nowhere more pronounced than in the area of traffic education. To be fair, safety problems on streets and motorways are indeed very serious concerns to China. According to the 'Global status report on road safety 2013' (pdf) published by the WHO, the country had a reported number of road traffic deaths of 70,134 and an estimated road traffic death rate per population of 20.5 in 2010 (US: 32,885 and 11.4, Germany: 3,648 and 4.7, respectively).

Even given the fact that the numbers have been decreasing constantly in the last couple of years, Chinese traffic death rates still are among the highest in the world. Being a nation of mostly first-generation car owners, that shouldn't come as a big surprise.

Traffic authorities have come up with a bundle of measures to counter the disturbing trend of reckless driving, speeding, alcohol consumption, overloaded trucks and buses, or tired drivers.

One of these is the widespread use of more or less extreme shock tactics. Aspiring new drivers are sometimes educated by being shown gruesome footage of crushed vehicles or by releasing videos of grisly road accidents depicting in graphic detail the dire consequences of lax driving habits.

One illustrative example for traffic education with Chinese characteristics is the photo above.

I came across the poster on the route from Shenzhen to Yangshuo and was stunned immediately. As if the actual mayhem wouldn't be enough, some splatter artist had to add artificial blood spots to highlight the gory effect.

Not being overly squeamish, I nearly had to admire the cartoonish nature of the artwork. Not so my Chinese friend who was the driver (and is far more sensitive). He even refused to have a glance at this inspired piece of education politics. I don't know if there are any impact studies available, but I have some doubts whether the explicit scare tactics by China's traffic authorities actually work.

Oh, in case you are into the gory stuff (and can stomach it), there are hours of video playtime on YouTube and its Chinese equivalent Youku of truly horrible road accidents in different regions of the country.