Highways, Hunger, Home (Chapters 3-5)

February 17, 2025:

Ms. Li (Li Mei) driving me toward Huizhou

Battery Economy

“There are roads I don’t like to drive on. Too narrow. Or the buildings make the GPS go crazy. You end up circling and circling.” She points to a place near Huaqiangbei. “That one? Always lagging. Too many towers and bridges and tunnels. Signal lost. The passenger will call and say ‘you’re in the wrong place!’ but how can I explain that the map is broken, not me?”

“You see these neighborhoods?” she says as we pass a cluster of sleek cafes and co-working spaces. “You can’t find a public toilet here. But in the older districts on the margins—Bao’an, Bantian—you can find a noodle shop that points you to a washroom, or sometimes, they have their own washroom that you can use.”

Li owns her electric taxi. “Some drivers also rent their cars from a fleet company. It’s around two thousand yuan per month,” she explained. “I bought mine. It’s not that expensive, and I don’t have to pay the rental fee every month. Plus charging, plus tolls, plus meals, at the end, I try to make at least 600 to 1000 yuan profit each week. That’s if there are no breakdowns.”

The electric taxis are quiet, but it demands rather a peculiar driving schedule when it comes to charging. “In Longgang there are a few stations, but sometimes they are all full. None of them are close to where I live.”

“In central areas, forget it. You park, wait, hope someone leaves soon.” She said she sometimes has to wait an hour just to access a charger. “Most of the charging points are in parking lots of office buildings. Some workers park their cars, occupy the charging point for the whole entire day, before leaving and driving home long long after their cars have finished charging. Meanwhile, I’m waiting in my car, desperately in need of recharge. That’s money wasted. Time wasted.”

The city of Shenzhen, lauded for becoming China’s first fully electrified public fleet city, has invested heavily in charging infrastructure. Yet, as with many policy-level changes, the everyday experience for drivers varies. “The government says we have tens of thousands charging points. Maybe. But how many are actually working? How many are near where we go? That’s the problem.”

During rush hours, charging becomes even more stressful. “You can’t switch cars during rush hour. One driver, one car. That’s the rule. But what if your battery’s dying?” She shrugged. “They don’t care. You got to be on the road. The rush hour doesn’t wait for you.”

With government initiatives that aggressively promoted the EV industry, charging stations sprang up in Chinese cities over the past few years, with nearly all parking lots in CBDs offering charging points. Specifically, the Guangdong provincial government issued the 2025 Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Construction Task List, requiring that the Shenzhen municipal authority build 50,000 charging points within its city boundary by the end of the year. It seemed unnatural that a taxi driver would struggle to recharge.

I consulted Shenzhen’s Urban Administration Office, which explained that EV charging station distribution depends on a variety of factors, including density of EV, availability of parking lots, and safety concerns. According to the municipality’s 2025 Specification for Fire Safety Management of EV Supercharging Station (Piles), there are 7.84 million EVs in China, resulting in over 3000 fire accidents. Thus, the city government’s Market Supervision Administration issued a series of Directives and Guidelines regulating fire safety and resource utilization of EV charging facilities, setting specific, unified standards for reviewing and approving charging station construction projects.

Most urban villages lack parking locations, as only a few residents own cars. They are typically overcrowded with old, shoddy constructions that present a range of safety concerns, their cramped passageways blocking firetrucks and ambulances in emergency cases. Consequently, charging EVs in urban villages violates fire safety standards, while demand for charging is scarce in the first place. Shenzhen’s taxi drivers, most of whom live in urban villages because of its affordability, face a paradox. Their jobs entail the ownership of cars incongruous with their socioeconomic standing, engendering unique challenges as they fight to reconcile this contradiction.

And still, Li prefers the electric model to gas. “It’s cheaper long-term—the car’s cheaper with state subsidies, and electricity’s also cheaper than gas. And no smell. But they should give drivers more support.”

Woman Behind the Wheel

It’s easy to forget that the person behind the wheel, behind a taxi meter, is an individual with a full life outside the cab window. Li Mei is a female taxi driver in a male-dominated gig economy. In China, taxi driving, food delivery, and express delivery are collectively called a “triathlon” for their labor-, time-, and mobility-intensive nature. These jobs require little skills or training, and so became the default option for white collar, middle class, and mostly-male individuals who lost their jobs over the past few years amid rising unemployment. “Most of the drivers are men. You can see them smoking, chatting in circles at the charging stations, swapping jokes. I don’t often join,” she said. “I eat in the car. I sit back in the drivers’ seat and rest in the car.”

Isolation is part of taxi drivers, shielded from the outside world in a small, mobile cabin. But for some, isolation is gendered. “Some passengers—some male and some female, funnily—think I drive worse because I’m a woman. They ask if I can handle the highway, or if my husband helps me park. Others talk down to me like I’m a helper.” She saw no point in arguing. “There are all sorts of short videos of female drivers crashing their cars with all the stupidity you can imagine. Mixing up gas and brake pedals, confusing left turn with the right, switching gears to R when they meant D…it’s funny, and these videos get viral all over the internet. They all label the driver as ‘female,’ as if there’s some sort of an association between gender and driving. But anyways, what’s there for me to change? When a passenger happens to have something against women, I turn up the volume of the radio and stare forward until the ride ends.”

She’s proud of her record. “I drive safely. I know the roads, even the shortcuts. Nowadays, Didi (the Chinese equivalent of Uber) App tells the drivers what route to take, and we can get fined if we diverge. Nobody’s really taking the shortcuts anymore, and new drivers don’t even know them. But I do. I haven’t had an accident in five years, you know.” Her voice lifted.

Gig Economy and the Last Driver

In 2024, an estimated 340,000 drivers worked for ride-hailing Apps in the city of Shenzhen alone, many under third-party contracts with limited benefits. “We’re not employees. We’re called users of the platform,” Li Mei explains. “It’s like how you’re a user of WeChat, or Douyin (the Chinese TikTok). If I get sick, if I have an accident, that’s my own problem.”

She drives her own vehicle, her hours unpaid unless booked. She bears all risk: battery failures, tire blowouts, unreasonable customers, sudden fare discounts imposed by the App. “They change the fare rules every now and then. Now, even long rides don’t make much unless it’s peak hour.”

Insurance? “I have basic, third-party insurance for my car. Nothing else. If I get hurt, I pay. If I crash, I pay.” She says this without drama. “Technically the insurance company pays for it, but when you renew your contract, they factor their past payments in and raise your fees. For the same insurance packet, every rider pays a different price set by the company. So in the end, I still pay for car damages. You just hope nothing goes wrong.”

The taxi industry’s shift from licensed blue cabs to App-based e-mobility models was meant to introduce competition, flexibility, and innovation. But for many like Li, it meant opacity and instability. “Management is very decentralized. People join and leave this job all the time. The old drivers had sort of a union. I’m not in it. Now, it’s just me and my phone.”

There are positive hues: “At least it’s mine to control. Nobody’s there telling me when to start. I tell myself to. And I stop when I’ve earned enough for the day and can’t keep on earning.”

She used to take Sundays off, but now she drives on weekends—half-days when orders are scarce, full-days when passengers are all around. “More people go out on weekends. Less people drive on weekends. I can earn a little more.” Holidays are no different. “Spring Festival? I drive. Shenzhen is very much a migrant city, so it tends to empty as people return to their hometown for the festival. But still, there are people left, and need taxis. And when the holidays end, huge crowds swarm back into the city through the airport and the high-speed rail station. That’s when all the taxis line up at the exit’s designated pickup spot to carry passengers, who’ve also been waiting in lines to reach that spot. A huge crowd of people embarking on a huge fleet of cars. For entire days, I don’t have to worry about taxi orders. I’m rarely short of fare, and some even pay extra to book my car in advance. I help them. And I earn more.” So every Spring Festival, Li stayed behind, driving on empty roads that remind her of how millions have departed for their friends and family, for their birthplace that nurtures their childhood memories.