I met a group of blue truck taxi drivers Wednesday evening, they'd lined up their trucks outside the Ningbo Bureau of Transportation and pasted papers all over their trucks. Apparently some of them are on a hunger strike also. Usually I don't like the blue truck taxis (they're usually very dirty and in a state of disrepair), but if a large group of people are protesting in China... so I decided to post them online to help give them some publicity.

The protestors gave me a newspaper article (available here in Chinese), even though it is from the People's Daily it does explain the story a bit. Apparently they drivers had to pay a high license registration fee, several tens of thousands of RMB (they told me 20,000rmb or US$3000), but the government changed the blue truck taxi policy to be more liberal, for there to be more competition. So the requirements for people who wanted to get the license later on was lower and the new drivers didn't have to pay such high fees. The old drivers think this is quite unfair, to waste all their money on a large fee that was then reduced and at the same time having to enter into greater competition. I guess this shows the fine line that the government has to walk along, how much regulation is too much, how little regulation is not enough. I wish them luck.

Here are some of the pictures I took:

"Hunger strike," "Give back my life savings," "Let me scrape along," "There's no way to live," "I want to survive."

"The Ningbo Traffic Department's '3 nos' policy [not clear what that is] has forced me to go on hunger strike."

"Just one notice from the government has taken away my life savings and forced me out of work. We ask, where's our livelihood? Where is the harmony? Where is the happiness?" (In case you didn't know, "harmony" is one of the key phrases for the PRC government now, always talking about making a "harmonious society.")

A long line of blue truck taxis.

Group photo of the protesters.