Cab drivers striking over costs
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Xinhua, August 2, 2011
The strike of cab drivers continued in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou on Tuesday, as more than one hundred drivers and hundreds of other people gathered outside a local police station demanding for release of detained protestors.
![Local residents pass by taxis parked along a street on Monday. The drivers of the cabs have gone on strike over rising gasoline prices and road congestion in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang province. [Photo/China Daily]](http://images.china.cn/attachement/jpg/site1007/20110802/0019b93bd68d0fa1ee1712.jpg "Local residents pass by taxis parked along a street on Monday. The drivers of the cabs have gone on strike over rising gasoline prices and road congestion in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang province. [Photo/China Daily]") |
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Local residents pass by taxis parked along a street on Monday. The drivers of the cabs have gone on strike over rising gasoline prices and road congestion in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang province. [Photo/China Daily] |
The strike started in the morning, with many of the protestors coming from the populous Henan Province in central China, local sources said.
Xinhua reporters saw a large number of police officers on the road. They kept the protestors, some of whom appeared excited, on the pavement so that they wouldn't affect the traffic.
Zheng Xiansheng, vice head of the public security bureau of Hangzhou, went to the scene to persuade the drivers to stop the strike. Some of the protestors left at noon.
About 1,500 disgruntled taxi drivers in Hangzhou took to the street from the rush hour of Monday morning to the night to complain about skyrocketing food, gasoline and housing prices, and the unchanged taxi fares.
Some protestors intercepted other taxis not involved in the strike, and smashed panes of these vehicles near the north coach station of Hangzhou Monday evening.
According to local police, two drivers and five others were detained for disrupting other drivers' services and hampering the work of police.
Wang Yichuan, deputy director of Hangzhou City Transportation Bureau, said the city government will raise taxi fares by the end of October, and provide taxi drivers temporary subsidies in response to taxi drivers' protest. Taxi drivers will receive a one-yuan (0.16 U.S. dollar) subsidy for each trip, starting Monday.
But protestors on Tuesday were dissatisfied with the reply.
"The taxi fares should have been raised early on," said a driver who only disclosed his surname as Wang. "The amount of one-yuan as subsidy is too small to change anything."
Hangzhou, which is famous for its scenic spots like the West Lake, has nearly 9,000 taxis.
China has seen many cabby strikes across the country due to gas price hikes and worsening traffic jams in recent two years. The latest one was reported in Zhengzhou, capital of central China's Henan Province, where nearly 200 drivers aired their complaints about the unfair recall of their operator's licenses by a local taxi company on June 27.
