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A Small Town e-Bike Shop

The Editors, eBikesDaily.com

Hebei Province, China  -  May 15, 2008  21:00 CST

At first glance, Xinchengpu, Hebei Province, is a poor farming town.  It is a dense three kilometer square grid of streets with lines of single-story, flat-roofed homes and tiny clothing factories, joined together behind red brick walls painted or tiled or covered in gray or white-painted cement.  Rarely is there space between buildings except for a narrow muddy alley.  There is one meter between the road and the front wall of each home.

At one side of the front of each home, at sidewalk level, there is a small opening covered with a gate of iron bars.  Behind this gate, down a concrete step, is a two-meter-wide dark space.  Here, in a tiny shallow basement, pigs or goats lie in warm shade beneath a room at the front of the house, gazing at passersby.

Also at one side of the front of each home there is a tall, wide, wooden or green- or black-painted metal, two-door gate that seals off the family compound within from the street.  Around each gate, left, right and above, and on the gate doors as well, are square and rectangular banners of red paper displaying lucky words in gold and black calligraphy.

When the doors of the gate are open -- as often they are during the day as family members come and go from the street market or from work in a nearby field or factory, or while children play just outside the gate -- a passerby can see the small garage-space behind these doors.  This space just behind the gate is the entry way into the home.  It ends at a far wall which displays a beautiful landscape painting on glazed ceramic tiles, three meters across and two meters high.  Beside this artwork, through an opening between walls, is the narrow courtyard around which are the family's small living quarters.

The town -- the cluster of these homes, the small factories among them, and the commercial district that is centered around a single intersection -- is surrounded this time of year by vast green fields of maturing winter wheat, on land that has been farmed by hand for thousands of years.

At the same time, Xinchengpu is forty kilometers north of a busy industrial center, the city of Shijiazhuang, where pharmaceutical factories add a chemical scent to the morning air.

Money from jobs in Shijiazhuang is transforming Xinchengpu rapidly.  Although families continue to farm, few of them now survive only on income from crops.  With a second glance at the town, signs of new prosperity abound.

On every street, families announce their success by rebuilding their homes.  There are many smart new front gates of green-painted metal with shining brass ornaments, surrounded by elaborate black and red frames.  New, gleaming white tiles on the front of homes catch the sun and the eyes of passersby.

And e-bikes and scooters are everywhere on the streets outside these houses, more and more each day.

The Bikes

We visited the local franchise for e-bikes and scooters of the Tianjin-based brand "Zhui Feng Niao" -- "Catching Wind Bird" -- in an electrical-appliance store a hundred meters from those crossroads that form the center of the commercial district, the only busy intersection in town.

The camera-shy owner explained that she has sold Catching Wind Bird exclusively for three years.  She says that she chose this brand because of its good customer service and comprehensive warranty.  Also, she explains, Catching Wind Bird advertises the suitability of its bikes for many different kinds of weather and road surfaces.

She reports having no average e-bike customer.  She sells regularly to all types of town residents, both young and old, with two things in common:

First, the customer is eager to switch from a conventional bicycle to an e-bike or scooter, expecting greater comfort, load-carrying capacity, range, speed and status from the e-bike.

Second, the customer is ready to part with 1,000 to 3,000 yuan (USD 143 to 429), the range of prices of the models she stocks.

She has not attached the pedals to the e-bikes on her showroom floor.  Except for this, her Catching Wind Birds look sharp in the photos we took today.

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