China 101
Bike sharing
共享单车
Dockless rental bicycles unlocked by QR code, a Chinese-invented mobility category that boomed, crashed, and consolidated into a quiet urban utility.
Dockless bike sharing was one of China's defining startup waves of the 2010s. Companies like Mobike (orange) and ofo (yellow) flooded cities with GPS-tracked bikes unlocked by scanning a QR code, solving the last-mile problem between transit stops and destinations for about one to two yuan per ride.
The sector overexpanded spectacularly, with bike graveyards of discarded bicycles becoming a symbol of startup excess, and ofo collapsed in 2018 leaving users' deposits unpaid. The industry then consolidated: today the surviving services, run by Meituan, Hello (backed by Ant), and Didi's Qingju, operate profitably enough as feeders into their parent super apps.
The model has since been exported worldwide, and shared e-bikes and scooters have joined the fleets. In Chinese cities, the colored bikes stacked outside every subway exit remain an unmistakable streetscape feature.