20 years ago each city/province was basically its own closed market. So if you were driving a car in CQ, it was probably bought and even made in CQ. They simply required that the horns be disabled.

China internally is much more of a free market now, so I’m not sure how they could just disable horns anymore, although you still can’t get away with driving an outside register vehicle inside a city for very long without getting a crackdown by the police (meaning, they can enforce inspection requirements fairly easily).

I’m not sure if it was really Chongqing or some other obscure city like Dalian, I’m going by hearsay 20+ years ago. More recently, Shanghai banned honking in most circumstances in 2007 (inside its outer ring), but it’s enforced with just fines.

Was actually quite surprised by how "civilized" the driving was in our recent China trip. Don't think I heard a horn once in probably 20h or so as a passenger, did find the drivers up in Heliongjiang a bit bold with their lane weaving but in Beijing they drove great!

Clear rules, and consistent enforcement works.

Noticed something similar with littering, right now they have to employ an army of old folks to pick up cigarette butts. But I suspect once people come to expect clean surroundings that enforcement of littering fines can become a thing and the culture around respecting public spaces will slowly change. We even caught a young kid full on lecturing their grandparent for spitting on the street.

Dongbei drivers are famous for their interesting driving (but I’m going by hearsay and that one famous song about it).

I don’t think horns were used much in Beijing even on my first trip in 1999, although I do remember the Japanese guy driving us from the airport in a Jeep using it (and also seeing lots of city buses out at night without headlights on, you don’t see that anymore).

I just got back from Beijing a couple of weeks ago and honestly…the traffic is still very horrible but fairly orderly. Just too many cars and not enough roads (but it’s always been like that).

Yeh the congestion on Beijing's ring roads is pretty awful. Orderly but awful, also less EVs than ideal.

Have a friend from Shanghai here in Germany that had a really hard time getting a drivers license due to her old driving habits. Aggressively cutting in front of people and horning isn't looked upon too highly here.