By Yu Bin, Tian Jietang & Li Guangqian, DRC

2017-7-11

After the mode of bike-sharing entered the public arena at the beginning of 2016, the shared bikes soon swarmed into city roads and became a hot issue of the media. The healthy development of bike-sharing has caught the eye of governments, enterprises, investment institutions, think tanks and the public.

Bike-sharing is quietly triggering a new industrial revolution. It has not only changed the way of people’s travel and the management style of cities, but also changed the operation mechanism of China’s economy and the society. Promoting the healthy development of sharing economy is of great significance for pushing forward the supply-side structural reform and fostering new driving forces for economic development. The mode of bike-sharing represents new format, new pattern and new driving forces which can greatly improve the traditional industry. It embodies the forward-looking concept of innovative, coordinated, green, open and shared development. With the development of “Internet Plus”, sharing economy has become an important format of the development of the current information economy and digital economy.

We need to take an inclusive and rational attitude towards problems relating to bike-sharing. Self-regulations and industrial norms can be formed only when the new industry develops to a certain stage. We need to adopt an inclusive approach toward startup businesses. Now people are talking much about the monopoly of bike-sharing and unfair competition, but we shouldn’t view the economic development from the sense of generalized monopoly and competition. Currently, no big problems such as the infringement of consumers’ interests have loomed up relating to the mode of bike-sharing although it is not yet managed in an orderly manner. After all, the government is mainly concerned about the protection of social welfare.

Common benefits rest on common management and co-construction with win-win results. Bike-sharing is a new industrial format in the course of transformation of China’s Internet economy from imitation to independent innovation. As an important mode of sharing economy, it requires the participation and governance of the central government, local governments, enterprises, citizens and the whole society, and calls for the joint efforts made by platform enterprises, supply side, demand side and relevant stakeholders for its development. The government needs to ensure a sound startup of the new industry, new format and new mode by giving approval, encouragement and support to their construction, and leading enterprises need to regulate the activities of the whole industry so as to make it perform with a standardized management.