The Ricksha Men's Petition

A poor and ignorant man judges his lot by his past. Thus did China's ragged ricksha pullers judge the Government's lofty pronouncement that their work was "archaic, inhuman and wasteful of manpower," and the Government's three-year plan to abolish all rickshas in favor of pedicabs, trolleys and buses.

In their straw-and-mud shantytowns, in the hong (company) sheds where they rent their vehicles, in cheap teahouses from Chungking to Peiping, the ricksha men shook their heads over the prospect. Ai-ya! Ai-ya! Truly, as the Sage had written, "it is difficult to be poor and not grumble." What now would become of them?

The Government spoke of inhumanity, but most ricksha men had come out of the greater inhumanity of hungry villages and hopeless slums. The Government spoke of archaic labor, but last week the ricksha men showed how necessary their labor was to a nation that is not yet wholly modern. In Shanghai, they staged a spectacular two-day strike against exorbitant rentals charged by the ricksha owners. The metropolis of 3,000,000 hiked to shop and office, jammed itself inhumanely in over-jammed trolleys. The municipal government's social affairs bureau mediated a truce while coolies and hong owners negotiated to fix standard rates.

Man & Beast. China has some 400,000 ricksha men; with their families they number over a million. They are as varied as their nation's cities. There are the muscular runners of Chungking, who bound downhill in great strides; the philosophical businessmen of Peiping, who pad their wages with commissions from shopkeepers to whom they wheel their riders; the noisy hagglers of Shanghai, whose existence is the meanest. Everywhere their shuffling straw sandals, klaxon cries and stained sweatbands are as ineluctably a part of China as temple gongs, a plum tree beside a bridge, or the marble Temple of Heaven.

In a land where human labor is incredibly cheap and abundant, the ricksha man serves as a draft animal. His daily income may be as high as $2 or even $3, but in China's feverishly inflated economy, the average ricksha man can buy less now than in prewar times when his income was measured in pennies. He often eats only two meals a day—one of rice and one of congee (millet or rice gruel), with salted turnips and bean curd now & then, meat once or twice a year. On this fuel, if he is not yet slowed by tuberculosis or premature age, he can jog four miles an hour; at a canter, he can do six. There is a style to ricksha pulling. Author Lao Sheh (Ricksha Boy) says ricksha pullers take pride in an elastic, steady gait. Two Old China Hands once put it this way:

"Why on earth did you take that old nag? Look at my coolie! There's a high stepper for you!"

"Oh, I never look above the ankles. The small-jointed ones run fastest, even when they're old."