It’s not fair to make a judgement call on an isolated incident, but for past two months i have experienced the same situation time after time when dealing with taxi drivers in Beijing. The bottom line is this: I feel like they hate foreigners and don’t even want to try to deal with them.
My Chinese is not great by any stretch, but i know how to get around a city and i have a decent vocabulary. But when i get in a taxi in Beijing they look at me like i’m making up my own language. They don’t even want to try to understand. And when we do get going in the right direction it is awkwardly silent the whole way. My questions are quickly answered with short grunts that scream, “LEAVE ME ALONE!”
Today, after asking a driver to take me to the “dong men” (the east gate) of a particular location he looked at me like i was an idiot and literally begged me to get out of his taxi and find another one. People who have been in China for one day know how to say “dong men.” What was this guy’s deal?
I blame it on the olympics and all the dumb foreigners who yelled at taxi drivers with stupid crap like, “TAKE ME TO THE BIRD’S NEST”…. “TTTHHHEEE BBBBIIIRRRRDDDDSSSS NNNNEEESSSSTTTT”
So now, when innocent “locals” like me want to go somewhere we get treated like garbage because the drivers are fed up with dealing with arrogant foreigners. I think this is terrible, i want the nice drivers who like to ask me what i think of Beijing, if i can use chopsticks and if i have a wife. To which i promptly answer, “Beijing is great. Yes, chopsticks rock. And No, i don’t have a wife… Do you?”
Jonathan, or Biscuet if you're his real friend, loves spending valuable time with Chinese people. He also gets confused when writing biographies in the third person. Jonathan "Biscuet" would much rather you read his blog than read his pitiful third person bio. He wants to be your friend.
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They were like that before the Olympics too. Sure there are some great drivers out there that will really go above and beyond, but they are few and far between. In all my worldly travels I can say that Beijing has some of the worst fucking taxi drivers in the world. It’s not that the arrogant foreigners screwed them up. It’s that they were dicks to begin with. Nothing has changed. Even the scammer drivers are still out in full force.
@ejsun: I agree agree agree agree ….. Beijing has the worst cabbies ever …. I traveled there with some of my Shenzhen (Chinese) engineers. They all had these wonderful opinions of Beijing until we got there and used the taxis. I had warned them ahead of time but they did not believe me. I hate Beijing …. 1/2 for the taxis … 1/2 for the crappy service in restaurants …..
I guess i’m somewhat relieved to know it’s not the Olympics’ fault.
I agree with all of the above. I’ve always hated traveling around Beijing for the very fact that their drivers are usually horrible (even before the Olympics), especially in the evening when they only want to take passengers who are leading them closer to their home.
I’m usually happy when one at least stops for me. If he’s rude while we’re in the car, I could care less. I hate standing on the side of the road waving down taxi after taxi because when I tell them where I want to go they tell me they aren’t going there.
There was actually a time that I was so fed up I just jumped in the taxi and told him I wouldn’t get out until he took me to where I wanted to go. I’m sure it could have backfired on me, but at least in that instance, it worked.
I’ve not been to Beijing yet however that’s the way the taxi’s were in Xian. They wouldn’t even stop for me unless I was carrying luggage. I was headed from the north gate to the south gate (nan da men) and I went up to a taxi at a red light who was waiting and he flipped his sign and refused to even listen to me. However once you get out of the cities that foreigners have been to (like the city I am teaching in Jingbian (靖边) then they flock to you-especially since you’re probably their first foreigner.
I have to disagree completely.
1: In my experience Beijing cabbies have always been gruff. One of the good aspects of my year in Taiyuan was the incredibly talkative cabbies- I learnt a hell of a lot of Chinese from them. Beijing was a bit of a shock, but I have never had such consistent trouble from the cabbies here as you all imply- and I’ve been in Beijing almost constantly since July 2001.
2: The cabbies here have always been gruff, but there’s always been a few of the more garrulous variety, and there’s only ever been a few who have been genuinely rude or (as implied) racist (refusing people based on their foreign appearance). Somewhere in the region of 90% of Beijing cabbies I have dealth with have obligingly, if perhaps gruffly, taken me where I told them I wanted to go. I’ve even had more than a few follow my directions rather than simply hear the destination and take the road they know.
3: I would agree that cab service has gotten worse, or at least less good, since people from the outer suburbs were allowed taxi licences. When I first moved to Beijing, all the cabbies were hardcore laoBeijingren, as in their families had been in inner city Beijing for generations, and they knew the city better than they knew the back of their own hands. Back then, getting in a cab meant the driver would as often as not zip through a bunch of non-descript hutongs in a not logically obvious series of zig-zags and arrive at your destination faster than you could’ve imagined possible. These days there are too many drivers from the outer suburbs who have lived in downtown Beijing for less time than my foreign self and don’t know the city anywhere near as well as I do, and who automatically head for the ring roads and other major arteries because they don’t know any better. I really need to get back in the habit of telling taxi drivers where to go.
4: Refusals and other bad taxi service are far more likely to happen in areas that attract tourists. Walk away. You generally don’t need to go more than a block before you’re back in normal Beijing. Of course, if you’re in a rural area, that becomes more difficult. Buses are your very good friends. Bus to somewhere you’ll get a regular cabbie, not tourist predator scum.
Even for our native Chinese, some of Beijing cabbies are not friendly and tricky. But there are still some nice ones. I agree with chriswaugh_bj. The news drivers from other provinces may have more living pressure in this metropolis, so they look more aggressive and rude.
you guides should get on one of the Guangzhou bus,and that is when the torture begins. Yet the taxis drivers here are a lot better
In my experience, Beijing cabbies are the worst in China and they were like this long before the Olympics. They hate foreigners not because they hate foreigners, per se, but because they have no clue where they are going and they figure foreigners also don’t know.
I am reading these messages in July 2009 and nothing has changed. Rude and surly, I have never been anywhere else where my destination has been refused so often, where drivers won’t put on their meters so frequently. It backfires on them too because I certainly don’t tip and I sit in the cab until ALL the change I have got coming is returned. It is usually pennies I wouldn’t bother mentioning elsewhere, but these grumpy guys are getting nothing extra off me. Beijing authorities need to sort this nonsense out unless they just want to be another third world ****hole. Although, no, I take that back, I’ve been in a number of ****holes where the people (taxi drivers included) had both dignity and charm. Beijing is just beyond the pale.