China didn't have traffic laws until 2004.

Before 2004 they had more of "guidelines."  These guidelines were not really ticketed when broken.

Now just put yourself on the streets of your hometown and imagine that there are no ticketable traffic offenses.  Getting to work every morning would be something of a mix between a stampede and a rugby scrum.

But in all honesty, though this is hard to believe for someone who is in one of China's major cities right now, no one had cars fifteen years ago so they really didn't need traffic laws.  Now, all of a sudden there are cars everywhere and the government is scrambling to build roads, install traffic lights, and pave freeways.  They've done an impressive job in fifteen years, right now China is only second to the US in miles of paved freeway.

But the streets are still crazy.  In Nanjing, taxi drivers will drive on the wrong side of the street if they can get away with it--no matter that there is a wildly honking, careening BUS heading straight towards them--whose driver is content to play chicken instead of swerving into the open lane on their right.  But you got to understand that there isn't a culture of driving here in China.  There is no "understood" guidelines of good driving passed on from generation to generation, like there is in the states.  There is no such thing as the "defensive driving" that my dad taught me.  In fact, the "dads" of China most likely never drove anything larger than a bike.  For example, they just started teaching head checks in driving school.  So the shouts of "check your blindspot!" mean nothing to most Chinese drivers as no one has told them what a blind spot is.

This is all to prove a point.  China is a growing nation where some concepts that are taken for granted in the States, as they have been around since the model T, are completely, absolutely new.  Chinese law is in a similar situation to Chinese driving.  Fifteen years ago, there were no solid trademarks laws, no real Intellectual Property guidelines.  The idea of owning ideas and technology is a foreign concept to the Chinese.  To most of them, black market goods aren't really that bad of an idea. Hey, if I can make it cheaper than you, than I should sell more than you--its only fair (never mind that you spent millions or billions of dollars developing this stuff, that's your problem.)

It's the same for almost every type of law here.  They are experimenting, things aren't established.

So the moral of the story?  Give the Chinese time to grow.  America has had hundreds of years to get used to copywrite laws and traffic rules.  You can't take it for granted that they have had these ideas stamped into their brains along with Captain Crunch and the Backstreet Boys.  Now, I don't know if China will ever be as tight on speeding tickets or on fighting black market goods as we are in the States, but they are instituing laws and they are improving.  But I still won't drive on the streets.