Ride hailing began in China 2,200 years ago. Isn’t it time Hong Kong’s taxi cartel accepted some competition and raised its game?

Ox-drawn carriages that picked up passengers and charged according to distance came first in China, followed by donkeys, sedan chairs and, much later, rickshaws
In Hong Kong ride hailing is still illegal, and taxi owners, rather than compete by providing clean cabs and a modern fare system, want stiffer curbs on it

Wee Kek Koon

Published: 7:45am, 6 Dec 2023

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I laughed out loud when I learned that taxi drivers in Hong Kong had planned a strike in November to protest against ride-hailing services, which they claimed were costing them millions of dollars a day in lost revenue.

The strike was eventually called off after the taxi industry extracted a promise from the government to crack down more severely on illegal ride-hailing services.

That’s right. DiDi, Gojek, Grab, Lyft, Uber, and so on, which are ubiquitous in many cities in the world, are actually illegal in Hong Kong.

Uber, which has a high-profile presence in Hong Kong with office space and thousands of drivers, operates in a legal grey area. Drivers without a taxi licence are breaking the law when they pick up paying passengers.

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The authorities have mostly turned a blind eye, but this may change if the government honours its recent promise to Hong Kong’s taxi cartel.

When I am not taking the trains or buses like a good, environmentally conscious citizen should, I prefer ride-hailing services to taxis mainly because the total fare is made known to passengers before the ride.

A 9th century stoneware model of an ox-drawn covered wagon with a lady passenger. By that time this mode of transport had been in use on China’s roads for more than 1.000 years. Photo: Getty Images

A minority of rogue taxi drivers overcharge their passengers or deliberately take longer routes to get more clicks on the meter, but the fares on Grab, for example, are predetermined and prepaid, so there are no unpleasant surprises at the end of the ride.

As early as the Han period (202BC – AD220) in China, there were ox-drawn carriages that picked up passengers and charged fares according to the distance travelled.

Donkeys were popular in the Tang dynasty (618–907) as a mode of transport that ordinary people hired to travel within or between cities, either on the donkeys’ backs or on carriages pulled by the animals. Inter-city and other long-distance travel implied that these operations were of some scale and complexity.

Donkey carts were still carrying passengers in China in the early 20th century. Photo: Getty Images

There were also covered omnibuses drawn by oxen or donkeys that could carry several passengers at once. These carriages were quite elaborately decorated, with lacquered sides and open windows from which paying passengers could look out on the busy roads.

One can imagine hundreds of these pretty, shiny wagons trundling along the streets of the country’s prosperous capital, Chang’an (present-day Xi’an), a massive city for its time with a population of more than a million people, many of them foreigners.

From the Song period (960–1279) until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, sedan chairs and palanquins carried by bearers were more popular in China.

A 19th century lithograph shows sedan chair bearers carrying a man in China. Photo: Getty Images

Compared to vehicles drawn by domesticated animals, they were easier to manoeuvre, especially in busy or narrow streets, and passengers could reach their destinations quicker. They were also much cleaner.

A European introduced rickshaws from Japan (where they were called jinrikisha, literally “human-powered vehicles”) to the Shanghai International Settlement in the 1870s. They were soon ferrying passengers in cities all over China.

In time, the rickshaws were replaced by trishaws, a three-wheeled chimera of a rickshaw and a bicycle, and similar hybrid vehicles.

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Automobile taxis became widely available in China in the latter half of the 20th century. Today, the industry is dominated by ride-hailing services like DiDi. The company is planning to list its shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange in 2024, which is ironic considering that private car ride-hailing is illegal in the city.

Instead of rising to the challenge by improving its services and operations, the local taxi industry has made numerous attempts to kill the competition. Traditional taxis and ride-hailing services are coexisting very well in other cities, which benefit their users, but passengers in Hong Kong must continue to endure services that are substandard or years out of date.

Hongkongers like to tell themselves, and the rest of the world, that Hong Kong is a beacon of free market competition. Prove it.