Driving In Xinyang

We visit Xinyang often to see my wife’s family. The urban center of the city has roughly 1.5 million people, and the greater area is 6 million. In China it is considered a mere exurb of Wuhan (200 kilometers north) and Zhengzhou (300 kilometers south). High school students are encouraged to leave and start their careers in a Tier 1 or 2 city.

Xinyang is scenic and the pace of life is relaxed. The Shihe river runs through the city center, under seven connecting bridges. It terminates at Nanwan lake surrounded by jungle mountains. The air is cleaner and the surrounding area has waterfalls, lotus blossom lakes, and tea farm mountains. The local maojian tea is one of the top ten famous teas in China.

Left: one of the bridges over the Shihe river. Right: It was considered bad luck to live south of the Shihe river. The city consulted a fengshui expert who advised them to build this pagoda. Then the south side could be redeveloped.

Maojian tea mountains

My in-laws live in Renfang Hutong, on the north side of the river. This is the old part of the city. It is very walkable and has 24 hour activity. On their block there is a dumplings shop, optometrist, tea shop, Haoxianglai convenience store, two bakeries, and the Hemei mall and grocery store. If you walk east there are carry-out shops selling zongzi‍, shaobing, dumplings, ice cream, fresh fruit. Around the corner is an art school where my daughter took classes. Even the alley has micro-storefronts (<250SF) including a hair salon and reganmian shop. All the retail has a very fast, high volume of daily transactions, and is cheap on a Xinyang budget.

At night the riverside has a meandering night market with hundreds of cart vendors serving street food. It is a romantic spot for young people and the city has played this up by installing several “date night” themed sculptures and light installations. Shihe Park is a short walk away and is full of people most summer evenings, strolling, dancing, or playing cards.

Left: Intersection outside Renfang Hutong. Right: leaving the Shihe Park.

The walkability of Xinyang is an incredible design improvement over cities like Baltimore and DC. My in-laws conduct all their errands and visit friends and relatives without the need of a vehicle. Nor is this amenity prohibitively expensive. A large three-bedroom apartment might sell for 10x the salary of a government official or banker.

Courtyard outside the apartment. These buildings are U shaped with interior courtyards. Some are still used for socializing but others have been converted into parking spaces

In the 2000s when Xinyang started to expand south of the river and in the Yangshan district, the city assumed cars were the future. These newer districts have wide boulevards and open plazas. The apartments have more square footage, in elevator buildings, and with more amenities. There is ample parking. Everything is spaced much further apart.

Apartments are smaller, and built in walk ups around shared outdoor courtyards. My in-laws can visit friends and relatives and conduct almost all their errands without a vehicle. There is much less friction in the city when you don’t need to worry about where to park and how to navigate traffic.

New Xinyang versus Old Xinyang

When Yangshan district was first built there was a lot of structural vacancy. The government mandated that all local governments officials move there as a condition of work. Today it is much more occupied than in 2014. But Yangshan is not human-scaled: the blocks are longer and the buildings tower over everything. People strongly prefer the old Xinyang.

Xinyang is a moped city. They are available to rent on every street. They are very practical for the city. Drivers can slip through dense traffic, use narrow alleys, park them anywhere. They can even drive them on sidewalks or the wrong way down one-way streets.

It requires a higher tolerance for risk. Almost nobody wears a helmet. Entire families are perched on a single moped, with small children crouched on the deck between dad’s knees. I have also children who looked as young as ten driving their siblings home. But I’m not convinced Xinyang driving is more dangerous than American driving. People don’t drive distracted because they must pay attention to the improvisational flow of traffic. Speeding is almost impossible. Accidents are less consequential when you’re on a 180 lb vehicle and going less than 20 mph. And because there are so many mopeds they create a safety in numbers that we don’t have on American streets. Driving a car through Xinyang is beyond my abilities, but on a moped I feel very comfortable and can get around anywhere.

Of course as Xinyang gets wealthier there is a growing appetite for cars. You often find young men driving Porsches, Mercedes, and BMWs. Xinyang is not a rich city, but cars are valuable status symbols which can help your standing. Many young men won’t start dating before getting a car. Even middle class families will pool together income from parents and grandparents to buy the sole male child a nice car, possibly the only car owned in the family. Like real estate, this is viewed to be a valuable investment in status. Lately EVs have taken over. There are too many EV car brands to track: BYD, Zhiji, Zeekr, Faraday, Li Auto, X-Peng, and many more. They sell for under $20,000 in foreign markets, but since tariffs are keeping them out they are selling to their own market. We test drove an Aito M7 and it seemed to drive as well as Tesla, with self-driving mode, voice-commands, and massage guns in the red leather seats. It’s also significantly cheaper.

Outside the city, the government has invested tremendously in new roads, bridges, signs, toll stations, and rest stops, all built in the last decade or so. There is a bank of cameras every 10 kilometers or so which track vehicle speed and can facial recognize the driver. But there are few cars. On an American highway you can encounter commuter traffic on every mile. But the drive from Xinyang to Wuhan or Zhengzhou is almost empty. Outside cities there are no suburbs, only undeveloped land or farms. High speed rails connects even third tier cities to rest of the country. There are not even tractor trailers moving goods around. On many occasions I have noticed that Baidu Maps was unaware of the existence of roads, even major roads that on ramp to highways. Huge area of blank space on these apps are actually filled with roads. It’s a testament to both how fast these roads are being built and how underused they are.

In a decade of visiting Xinyang I have watched a city be introduced to the automobile in a way Americans have not witnessed since the early 20th century. Many of the qualities that Americans admire in their oldest, most walkable cities were already organically present in Xinyang. The city has invested in itself tremendously, but all in a car-shaped direction. While the quality of life there is not simply explained by the relative absence of cars, neither has the spread of cars improved the city in any obvious way.