A Mystery: License plates? Hah! We don’t need no stinking license plates

A beautiful lemon yellow Ferrari almost hit me and my little daughter recently as we were riding to school. We were crossing the street in the pedestrian zone with a green light when the car came roaring around the corner, going the wrong way on a one-way street. I saw a yellow blob in my periphery and stopped just as the car zoomed by me. This isn’t going to be one of my rants about idiotic drivers and anarchic traffic in China. I want to discuss something much more interesting. The funny thing about this Ferrari is that it doesn’t have license plates. The driver often parks it in my apartment complex, and I’ve been observing it for two years now, maybe longer.

The car is parked to the left of the front gate of my apartment complex. There's apparently no need to hide it from the police.

In New York or London, any cop would love to pounce on a Ferrari racing around town without license plates. They’d love to ticket some hotshot yuppie who thinks he’s above the law because he makes a few million more than the rest of us. But in China’s “communist police state,” the cops are apparently happy to turn a blind eye to a Ferrari without plates. A Chinese policeman looks at that car and probably sees a vehicle that’s being driven by someone important – an individual YOU DON’T WANT TO MESS WITH. Maybe it’s a rich industrialist with high-level connections. Maybe it’s the playboy son of some high-ranking Communist Party official or army general. Doesn’t matter. Anyone who can afford a Ferrari and drive it around without plates in China is probably someone who could ruin a cop’s career with one phone call. The day the Ferrari almost wiped out me and my daughter, I caught a glimpse of the driver. He was a middle-aged Chinese guy with a hairstyle similar to the one Warren Beatty wore in the movie “Shampoo.” He was also wearing a funky form-fitting sweater with what appeared to be a rabbit fur-lined collar.

Just for fun yesterday, I asked one of the security guards at the front gate why the car didn’t need plates. I knew he would give me a nonsensical answer because he has probably been instructed not to talk about the car. He didn’t disappoint me. First, he said he didn’t understand the question. When I repeated it, he laughed nervously before saying, “Well, because of traffic conditions, he doesn’t put plates on for safety reasons.” Ugh? I raised the issue with another local in the complex. I floated my theory about Mr. Ferrari being important, well connected and untouchable. He agreed with me and said, “In China, everything is OK.” But I think George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” provides a more accurate description of the situation. At the end of the book, the corrupt, power-hungry pigs decide: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”