IN CHINESE days are named according to numbers. Thus Monday is "Weekday one", Tuesday is "Weekday two", etc. This made it easy for the Beijing city authorities to impose a selective ban on small cars inside the third ring road which marks the city limit. Little family cars with registrations ending with odd numbers are not allowed on the city streets on "even" days, and vice versa.
The measure is aimed at cutting down the number of vehicles in a city whose roads are choked with traffic on weekdays and whose citizens suffer what is said to be the worst pollution of any capital in the world.
The car most affected is the Charade, the tiny four seater which forms the backbone of the Beijing taxi fleet and which is manufactured in the nearby city of Tianjin. Their owners could be forgiven for feeling a sense of grievance as they see bigger cars hogging the streets every odd and even day, including foreign made models owned by Chinese rich enough to pay a 200 per cent import duty.
The selective ban wasn't applied to large automobiles. It would affect the operation of important business concerns, and the cynics say, inconvenience top officials who travel in limousines. The measure also does not tackle the fundamental problem of how to cope with the huge increase in traffic caused by the unprecedented growth rate of recent years.
As China's economy began to expand in the 1980s, and a mass movement of people from rural areas to east coast urban centres got under way, many cities like Beijing made plans to cope with increased traffic by expanding mass transit systems. But during the last year, lack of capital and political will has meant the shelving of some ambitious blueprints.
In Beijing a planned eight mile cross town rail line to expand the 25 year old, highly efficient, underground system, which consists of only one circular line and a branch line to the city steel works, was to have opened next year, but will not now be completed until well into the 21st century.
It is the same story in Qingdao, the northern coastal city where China's famous Tsing Tao beer is brewed. Approval for a tunnel beneath its harbour was withdrawn last December, and all the Qingdao authorities have to show is an abandoned hole in the ground. Similar projects were shut down in Nanjing, Shenyang and Tianjin.
The consequences of sidelining mass transit programmes and promoting road traffic are causing concern in China and abroad. Environmentalists worry about increased global warming caused by the emissions from tens of millions of new cars in the coming years. China's leading scientists also oppose, for a variety of other reasons, a car building programme in which Chinese auto makers would try to emulate Henry Ford's achievement of mass produced cars at affordable prices. They issued a major report a year ago saying that it would be unwise for China to promote the widespread availability of family cars in the next few years because of the size of China's population, currently 1.2 billion, and a serious shortage of local oil resources.
However, the automobile plants of the Ministry of Machine Building Industry employ two million workers and constitute a powerful lobby. Two years ago the State Council under the Prime Minister, Mr Li Peng, set as its goal the establishment in China of a number of powerful car makers in joint ventures with foreign auto manufacturing giants like General Motors.
Chrysler is already the fourth largest joint venture in China, yielding gross sales of half a billion dollars. No one disputes the need for investment in roads.
China, the third largest country in the world after Russia and Canada, has only a tenth as many miles of roadway 541 per million inhabitants as the US, and much of this ancient network of highways is unpaved.
With economic expansion, the volume of freight on the roads is expected to double by 2000. A quarter of the $295 billion to $370 billion allocated to infrastructure in the ninth five year plan is expected to go on roads and railways and the rate of construction of new motorways will quadruple to 1,800 km, according to the transport ministry.
Visitors to Beijing this summer could see some of the road building going on during their obligatory trip to the Great Wall, 80 km to the north. They had to cope with traffic jams on slip roads as work neared completion on a new expressway to bring future tourists to the city's most famous attraction. State television carries documentaries eulogising road construction crews. One last week praised the sacrifice of workers tour of whom died making a new stretch of highway through difficult mountain passes.
But this does not solve the problems of traffic choking the city streets. The increasing paralysis in urban centres like Beijing and Shanghai threatens to cut back the growth rate by lengthening delivery times, discouraging foreign investment and dissipating time and energy in traffic jams.
Ironically there is little money for mass transit projects because of the Communist Party's policy of providing cheap, mass transport for the people. A trip on the Beijing metro costs about 15 pence, 10 times less than in comparative world cities, and cross town trips by bus are only a few pennies.
This provides little money for investment, and ensures that existing systems are overworked and over crowded. While gleaming new buildings rise into the Beijing sky, the streets are filled with rusting old buses crowded to bursting point. Anyone wanting to get into really close contact with Beijing citizens need only make a journey by bus.
Attempts to involve private enterprise in road building have met with problems. A Hong Kong company brought in to construct a 123 kilometre expressway between Hong Kong and the capital of Guandong province encountered bureaucratic impediments, cost overruns and construction delays, and toll revenues were lower than expected. On September 2nd, the government issued an edict which confirmed that the Chinese car makers are winning the argument.
It stated. "The automobile industry will be a pillar of China's national economy. Economy size cars will be a focus of its development, especially the mini car which has little exhaust emission, less petrol consumption, takes up less parking room and is cheaply priced.
In these circumstances, it said, there should be no artificial restrictions on what kind of vehicle could get permission to use the road and what should be banned. This was a pointed reference to Beijing's odd and even digit ban on the Charade and other small cars. It is the restriction itself, it appears, whose days are now numbered.