How a traffic cop can make a difference

The story seems at first look rather trivial, but what here is happening is rather crucial for China's ongoing change. (China Smack picked it up from the internet and has more pictures.)
What it illustrates is a traffic police man challenging the driver of a car with military license plates. As you can see from both the face of the driver and the reactions on the internet: this is not normal, normally police officers stay away from anything that smells like the People's Liberation Army (PLA).
Traditionally, China's administration is organized along vertical administrative pillars that run through the country and typically had their own beat. The Communist Party is the best known 'pillar', but there have been originally six, often competing with each other on every possible level. The PLA was a second powerful pillar in society and that was reflected in the fact that their cars could ignore ordinary traffic rules and police officers often did not dare to stop cars with military licenses. You could never know who would be inside.
In the second half of the 1990s that led to a chaotic traffic in Shanghai, where almost a quarter of the cars was carrying those military license plates, and made every use of it. That stopped when the Shanghai municipality struck a deal with the PLA and the military police appeared every now and then on the Shanghai street to stop those cars. That cleaned up much of the traffic chaos in Shanghai and nowadays even most military cars stick to the traffic rules.
But the idea that local police can order military cars around is still not that common, and this incident, together with the online reactions, show that people are fed up with that system. They want the old administrative traditions to disappear.
As very interesting incident, for those reasons.

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