ABSTRACT
Harbin might be a regional backwater, stranded 700 miles northeast of Beijing, surrounded by Siberia, Mongolia, and North Korea, but if you stood on any one of the major thoroughfares after sundown on any night of the week, you would swear you were stuck in a traffic jam somewhere between Tokyo and Las Vegas. The traffic there was mind-boggling: not just for its volume, which was heavy enough to rattle a New York cabbie, although certainly no worse than the average European or South American city. What made it so startling were the almost microscopic tolerances of distance each careening bicyclist, taxi driver, bus driver, motorcyclist, or donkey cart driver allowed one another. God help the pedestrians, because no one else will. And yet they, too, seemed able to weave and wind their way through this mix with a mixture of aplomb and resignation unimaginable in the West. And amazingly, fender-benders were rare, serious accidents even rarer, and all of those careening, destination-bent people seemed to find a way to get by, around, or past one another on a constant basis, with minimal mishap.
