China's Bike-Sharing Fever Has Reached the Breaking Point

Back in 1987, when I was still a boy, my father, a doctor, attended a medical conference in Communist China. He returned from Beijing with tales of a sea of bicycles upon which millions of workers in identical inky blue tunics peddled to farms and factories. By the time I’d moved to Beijing almost three decades later, China’s process of reform and opening had hauled 600 million people out of poverty, and turned the world’s most populous nation into its No. 2 economy.