The nation with the largest population in the world also has the largest fleet of bicycles on the road. Yet China's significance in the history of the cycle has been inadequately represented. Chinese officials and contemporaries in the late 19th and 20th century observed the cycle as a modern invention and a foreign means of transport in the West and something China at that time wasn't quite ready for.

In the 1860s a selected group of Chinese learned of a new mode of transportation known as a 'cycling device' from a Chinese official's journey to Europe. Binchun was a high ranked official and was part of a team returning from Western Europe. While technological progress was seen and noted in terms of the steam engine and the railways, the concept of the bicycle wasn't given much thought. Practical applications such as the railways, street lights, telephones, cycles, were seen as imported foreign ideas, something which the Chinese found bewildering as it meant doubting one's own culture and moving away from it. However China's elite saw advancements in technology as a means to progress forward and openly promoted it.

Chinese officials however noted the importance of the bicycle as a practical means of transport only after its safety was guaranteed. Chinese newspapers reported its features and its capabilities and compared it to the purpose a horse would serve during war. With European and American emigrants residing in Shanghai and Beijing somewhere around the 1880s, few newspapers published about foreigners riding through the streets of Shanghai.

Your social status determined individual mobility. The Chinese rich were rarely seen walking the streets and were either carried in a sedan styled chair or were hand pulled in a rickshaw. Chinese cyclists however took to the streets at the turn of the 19th century. Western-educated Chinese cycled on the streets of China and were not reluctant to display their progressive attitude in contrast to the old elites. Cycling advertisements soon made its way into newspapers and came to be known as racing bikes. Cycling was however prohibited in certain cities which were intertwined by narrow lanes, like the city of Suzhou.

British cyclists, Lunn, Lowe and Fraser made their presence felt in the Chinese cycling market, followed by the Americans and Germans who offered diverse products for men, women and children. However bikes were 40 times more expensive in China than in the land they originated from and were affordable only to the noble rich. Social and cultural revolutions led to many changes including the growth of an urban middle class. Shanghai accounted for 2 million inhabitants of which 9,800 people owned bikes in 1925. By 1930 the number rose to 20,000. In 1949 with the birth of the communist government, bicycles made their presence felt in the first Chinese Five-Year-Plan where they became part of urban street planning.

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