But then, on Nov. 20, 2003, the city announced a plan to revoke the permits and force the cabbies to buy new ones. City officials wanted to raise funds for new projects, which could boost their careers, and offered the cabbies no compensation. The plan would mean financial disaster, especially for those who had just bought permits.
The cabbies and their relatives began gathering outside city hall almost immediately to protest the decision. After a few days, the crowd had grown to hundreds, and almost all of the city's thousand-plus cabbies were on strike.
Liu Yu and her husband, Liu Feng, spent their life savings to buy a taxi permit in Dazhou, China. When the city decided to revoke all permits and require cabbies to buy new ones, they were among the hundreds who fought back.
(Philip P. Pan -- The Washington Post)
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The city sent the head of its Letters and Visits bureau to address the crowd. Using a loudspeaker and standing behind rows of police, the official told the cabbies their strike was useless. He also told them to think of their permits as old shoes that couldn't be worn any more, witnesses said.
That only made the drivers angrier. "Someone in the crowd shouted, 'We'll meet tonight at 10 at the Textiles Hotel,' and hundreds of us went," recalled Yuan Ting, 24, one of the younger and most outspoken cabbies there. "We discussed what to do, and we decided to appeal for help in Chengdu," the provincial capital.
For six days in Chengdu, she and about 200 other cabbies gathered outside government buildings, standing or kneeling in the cold and rain, chanting slogans such as, "Dazhou City, return our hard-earned capital!"
Letters and Visits officials listened politely but urged the cabbies to go home. The cabbies refused. Finally, Li Xiangzhi, the mayor of Dazhou, traveled to Chengdu and met with them in a packed hotel conference room.
A tall, lanky man in a dark suit, Li defended the re-licensing plan. But one cabbie after another stood and challenged him, describing the financial losses they would suffer. Yuan, who went into the taxi business with her husband soon after they married, took the microphone, too.
"I wasn't nervous, just angry," she recalled. "I told him, 'We're all heavily in debt. Even my husband's 80-year-old grandmother borrowed money to help us to buy the permit.' "
The mayor listened for more than two hours, then signaled a willingness to compromise. According to several drivers, he put his hand on his chest and promised, "As a city mayor, I will not let you lose all the capital you have invested."
That was enough for the drivers, and city officials arranged for buses to take them back to Dazhou. Outside the hotel, the mayor told Yuan to hurry up and gather her things, calling her a "little hot pepper."
She looked up at him and shot back, "You'd better keep your word."
A Broken Promise
The strike ended when the cabbies returned home. But less than two weeks later, the mayor broke his promise. The Dazhou government announced that it was revoking the current permits and scheduled a hearing on what it described as "reform of the taxi industry."
At the session, a slender woman with apple cheeks sat in the front row, wearing a light blue coat. Her name was Liu Yu, and her husband was a cabbie. The mayor and a row of other officials sat up front. Outside, hundreds more cabbies waited in the cold, barred from entering by military police.
Liu, 37, leaned into a microphone and denounced the city's plan. "The purpose of reform is to improve people's lives, but what you are doing now will cause this industry to collapse!" she recalled saying. "Do you call this reform? If every time a government organ takes action for a certain profit and gives it a splendid label like 'reform,' how can the people survive?"
