Driving the debate on security
In the run-up to next year's Olympics, panda cartoon images plaster roadside billboards while campaigns have started to teach Beijing's notoriously rude and belligerent taxi drivers 'civilised behaviour' and a spattering of English-language niceties.
Taxi drivers have long been a source of information for foreign businessmen and diplomats. Short of state secrets, they knew most of the political rumours long before anyone else, and in the 1980s prided themselves on being better and more accurate sources of information than official news agencies. In most cases, they were.
By the 1990s, the drivers had transformed their role. Rather than just whispering political intrigue, they prided themselves on being barometers of China's economic transition and the juxtapositions it presented. Drivers often composed poetic little ditties, memorised and recited for passengers, about factories going bankrupt, state enterprises laying off workers, the imminent collapse of the social security system, and the rise of prostitutes.
Today, Beijing's taxi drivers are no longer using their brainpower to memorise and recite ditties. Rather, they have become icons of a booming hi-tech telecommunications industry. By sending the latest text message, they are digitising the national mood in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics.
This year's hottest text message tells of an Arabian Nights-like tale of Osama bin Laden. He calls his terrorist brothers together and warns them: 'China is the only country in the world which must certainly never be attacked, as the consequences will be devastating for the perpetrators.'
Bin Laden's fear, so the tale goes, is not due to the nation's assumed rising military might, but from the 'Chinese characteristics' which still befuddle even the most experienced investment adviser from time to time.
Bin Laden warns his guerillas to take heed of lessons from a failed plot by another terrorist organisation. According to the tale, five terrorist missions were sent to China, but only one came back.