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SHANGHAI — After decades of getting its millions of citizens off their bicycles and into modern transportation, China is now struggling to make a big policy U-turn.

Last month, southern China’s Zhongshan city for the first time filled its streets with 4,000 public bicycles, which citizens can ride free of charge for up to an hour. To further fuel the sharing, the city also built an online platform that gives citizens real-time information on where the closest docking station is and how many bicycles are available.

This is one of numerous bike-sharing programs that are quickly growing in an attempt to unsnarl China’s traffic problems. Program promoters are also having to wrestle with financial barriers as well as a hostile environment that has developed for bikers in cities that used to have millions of them. The goal is to try to get back to days when the streets weren’t gridlocked and when the majority of vehicles didn’t create emissions.

Bike sharing started in Amsterdam as early as 1965. The concept then spread around the globe in cities including London and Washington. But Chinese cities, which joined this trend only a few years ago, are installing their networks at an unprecedented speed.

Q. How does the food industry respond to those in the public health and nutrition arena who systematically call them out? Is there is a legitimate fear that one day “the people” will realize how unhealthy many of their products are?

t General Mills, and I learned about CSAs from an R&D scientist working on one of my teams.

Now if you’re talking about the Big Food company executives, I do think they feel threatened. However, most of these executives tend to dismiss those who “call them out” as wrong or misinformed, versus taking a serious look at changing their business model. After all, these executives and their companies have a huge interest in maintaining the status quo.