Forgetting Wang Keqin and the Beijing Taxi Cartel

Wang Keqin is one of China’s most famous investigative journalists. In 2002, the China Economic Times published Wang Keqin’s 30,000 character report “The Inside Story on the Beijing Taxi Cartel.” This article was responsible for breaking Beijing’s taxi monopoly and ending its serious abuses of Beijing’s taxi drivers.

The report went as far up as Wen Jiabao and was hot stuff on the news stands.

Over the past two weeks, a friend and I have been interviewing Beijing taxi drivers in the hope that they could talk to us about the old taxi monopoly and Wang Keqin. We’ve have yet to find a single driver who has ever heard of him.

Could something so important that occured so recently already be forgotten? The taxi drivers say they aren’t new to the business.

I find this very strange.