The two-wheeled Chinese invasion of Manchester happened with little warning. Suddenly, late last June, they appeared on street corners. Silver and orange and bike-like, but unlike any bicycle most people had seen before. The tyres were solid, there was no chain, no gears and no instructions, just a mysterious barcode on the handlebar stem.

Dockless public bike hire - bikes that you could pick up and put down without locking them away - had arrived in the UK. Manchester city council was delighted that Mobike, a Chinese firm backed by multibillion dollars of venture capital investment, had chosen Manchester for its first European incursion. “We do things differently here,” goes the local maxim. Second city? First, more like. Poor old Londoners, lumbered with their dull grey Boris bikes, having to trundle to a docking station any time they want to park and charged £2 for the privilege.

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Soon, the dockless revolution spread to other UK cities. A fleet of yellow bikes operated by Mobike’s major Chinese rival, Ofo, made an attack on Sheffield’s seven hills. Donkeybike, a Danish firm, pedalled in to Plymouth, Cheltenham and beyond. YoBike, a UK firm experimenting with dockless even before the Chinese rode into town, expanded from its Bristol base into Southampton. Mobike began operations in Newcastle, Oxford and Cambridge. So many rival firms had a crack at the London market that a whole load of bikes were impounded, with users effectively accused of fly-tipping.

That remarkable spread might seem to indicate an idea whose time has come - but in Manchester this week, events suggested that the UK might not quite yet be ready for it. Frustrated by the regular disappearance of bikes and under pressure to start providing investors with a return, Mobike told Mancunians that if the trouble didn’t stop, the bikes would go.

“This is not an idle threat,” company spokesman Steve Milton said, admitting that 10% of the firm’s 2,000-strong Manchester fleet were disappearing every month. “It’s not PR ... The losses are not sustainable. We are going to have to draw a line under this at some point.” With Mobike also expected to leave Newcastle and other cities already abandoned by rival firms, you could be forgiven for wondering if the wheels on the country’s new love affair with bikes are coming off.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mobikes in Manchester’s Exchange Square. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

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In Manchester, it began within days of Mobike’s launch. In the parks and estates just a 10-minute ride from the increasingly glitzy city centre, it didn’t take long for gangs of youths too young to legally rent a Mobike to figure out how they could have a go regardless.

They quickly realised there was no computer code to crack. You just had to smash the lock off, disabling the GPS tracker. Away you went. The stolen steed was off grid: “your” bike was frozen in time on the Mobike app. Anyone who went to find it would be disappointed. It was a phantom bike: there, but not really there.

Young people felt locked out, thinks Jenny Frost, an academic at Manchester Metropolitan university, who works around community engagement and community spaces. “This was partly about haves and have-nots,” she believes. “I don’t think it was an unconscious protest. In a way, it was the young people engaging with their surroundings, albeit in a selfish way which had consequences for everyone else. It’s a bit like graffiti.”

It wasn’t like this in Asia. When Mobike expanded into Singapore with 5,000 bikes, just two locks were broken in the first few months, and they were probably accidents. But there’s a difference between operation in an authoritarian regime where people aren’t allowed to chew gum and a city famed for chancing it.

Public bike share was supposed to herald a global cycling revolution, giving everyone the opportunity to ride a bike, however meagre their income or absent their bike shed. It would improve social integration, give the unemployed access to jobs, combat obesity, clean up the filthy air.

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But increasingly, bike sharing behemoths are cherry-picking the most affluent areas in which to operate. If Mobike leaves Manchester and Newcastle as expected, the firm will only be in the “golden triangle” of Oxford, Cambridge and London. In Bristol, YoBike now only lets users park in the nicer bits of the city and Ofo has abandoned Sheffield, Norwich and Leeds.

Talking to the Guardian earlier this week, Mobike’s Milton mused as to why the firm had suffered so much vandalism in Greater Manchester. Perhaps it’s the geography, he suggested: within a mile of the city centre, skyscrapers are beside some of the poorest estates. “But in London, too, we have discovered there are some areas we have realised are no-go areas, for social reasons,” he said. “They are areas where if you put bikes there, they disappear. Maybe in Manchester we see that more because these sorts of areas are nearer the city centre, or in between Manchester and Media City in Salford?”

Such talk enraged Brian Deegan, advisor to Chris Boardman, the former Olympic champion turned Greater Manchester cycling and walking commissioner. “Having been born and raised in ‘no go’ areas I think it is sad to diminish the role of cycling as a tool to promote social inclusion and democratisation. Bike share for all,” he tweeted this week.

Steve Pyer, who launched Mobike in the UK and is now an independent consultant, said it is not true that Mobike and its ilk are the preserve of the rich. “It shouldn’t be. London’s got its areas that aren’t particularly nice. Even Oxford and Cambridge, these lovely university towns, have areas with lower income families. The really good example in the UK is Glasgow, where there are lots of lower income communities, and Next Bike do a fantastic job there.”

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Nextbike, a German company which also operates in Cardiff, only charges a monthly fee of £5 for unlimited half hour rides. While only a fifth of its 150 schemes worldwide are dockless, its UK managing director, Julian Scriven, attributed its lower rate of theft and vandalism - just 1% in Glasgow - to proper engagement with communities, including in “more challenging areas”. “The more you pull it back to so-called good areas, the more people feel disenfranchised.” And then nick bikes.

But he admitted, Britain’s antisocial behaviour was a shock to the firm. “Sadly, the UK compared to the rest of mainland Europe has a lot less respect for shared resources. Our parent company in Germany honestly find it hard to get their head around the generic levels of vandalism and theft that occur in the UK.”

The future, Pyer thinks, could be better tracking devices, or bikes that can be locked to street furniture (and made harder to throw in the canal). Whatever happens, he says, Mobike’s UK adventure has been a crazy 14 months. “They could easily have pulled the plug at the first sign of trouble, but they stuck with it for a year. They’ve employed people where they know our bikes are being damaged to try to get people on board and tried to win over hearts and minds. At the end of the day, though, they are a commercial company and they cannot lose money for ever.”

Additional reporting: Gwyn Topham