Almost anyone who challenges authority on the mainland at the moment is guaranteed the approval of netizens. So it was no surprise that Yang Zhiguo became an overnight internet star earlier this month, after he was filmed hurling bricks at cars that were jumping a red light near his home in Lanzhou, Gansu province .
The 74-year-old retired teacher explained that he was bombarding the cars because their drivers refused to abide by traffic laws.
Eighty per cent of the 400,000 netizens surveyed on sina.com supported Mr Yang's actions. More unusually, though, his unconventional approach to traffic policing was applauded by large sections of the mainland media. Their sympathetic reporting of the incident reflects the growing anger at the widespread flouting of traffic laws, as well as the failure of authorities to enforce them.
Two recent cases in particular have sparked a debate about why the mainland's roads are the most lethal in the world. In May, a 20-year-old boy racer killed a pedestrian in Hangzhou , while driving at double the speed limit.
Last month, in Nanjing , a drunk driver ploughed into pedestrians and parked cars. He killed five people, including a pregnant woman and her husband.
Nothing illustrates the ineffectiveness of the mainland's traffic laws, and the way many drivers regard them as mere formalities, more than the fact that the Nanjing driver had racked up an amazing 80 traffic violations in the three years he had possessed a driving licence. The Hangzhou speedster received a three-year prison sentence earlier this week; justice of sorts even if it didn't satisfy his victim's family.
Even before car ownership became an obsession for the middle class, China's roads were dangerous. The mainland has led the world in traffic deaths since 1996, despite having just 3 per cent of the planet's cars. Last year, officially almost 75,000 people died on the roads. The vast majority of them were pedestrians, but overall fatalities were 10 per cent fewer than in 2007. That sounds impressive, until you consider that the World Health Organisation estimated that the actual number of traffic deaths on the mainland in 2007 was more than 220,000.