In late September, a video of a white SUV and a black car colliding on a highway in Shandong Province went viral. Netizens were shocked by the two drivers’ seemingly suicidal collision, saying that lunu zheng, a Chinese term referring to road rage, has become one of the major causes of road deaths. Fortunately in this case, both survived.
With “lu” meaning “road,” “nu” meaning “rage” or “anger” and “zheng” meaning “disease” or “illness,” lunu zheng is used to describe drivers who easily become enraged behind the wheel if tired or offended by another driver who he or she believes has challenged him/her. The case in question happened when the SUV blocked the car from overtaking it. Mad at being blocked, the black car began to deliberately bump against the SUV and the two vehicles jostled for several hundred meters until the black car caught up with the SUV and suddenly bumped it into the barriers.
It is just one of numerous cases of lunu zheng that have appeared recently. Shortly before this clash, a man in Shandong Province was charged for intentional homicide by bumping his car against another driver who had suddenly changed lane and overtaken him. The two drivers then stopped their cars and argued, adding more fuel to the flames.
In 2012, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences conducted a survey of 900 randomly chosen drivers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and found that 35 percent of them claimed that they suffer from lunu zheng. The survey indicated that lunu zheng is closely related to the pressure on a driver, the traffic situation, the weather and the acts of other drivers on the same road. Medical experts have defined lunu zheng as a psychological disorder that poses great risk to road safety.
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