The People’s Revolutionary Army Museum in Beijing is enjoying its biggest crowds in years, but the main attraction is not the tanks, armoured vehicles and rocket launchers that were once the chief source of national pride. Instead the throng is flocking to see the latest cause of wonder in modern China: the affordable, four-door family saloon.
In a dramatic sign of the changing times in China, the museum — which is supposed to be dedicated to the bloody struggle for a communist motherland — became a temporary car showroom last week: an incongruous choice of venue for the Beijing New Car Show forced on the curators by the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak earlier this year.
It is a fitting symbol of new China that the trophies of the bloody past have made way for the consumer durables of the materially obsessed present. When the show opened last week, the museum’s giant statue of Mao Zedong was relegated to at best an ornament, at worst an impediment as thousands of middle-class Beijingers made a beeline for the flashy displays of VW Polos, Hyundai Sonatas and Mitsubishi Jeeps in the halls behind the monument.
True, it is capitalism with Chinese characteristics — there are more security guards than glamorous models and the range of vehicles is small — but the focus on cars rather than tanks is revealing.
In today’s China the cultural revolution is on the roads, where increasingly rich urbanites have the money and the freedom to drive, and in the car factories, where the world’s biggest and cheapest labour force is increasingly exploited by foreign and domestic capitalists.
After one of the most explosive periods of growth in the history of manufacturing, China is set to overtake France this year as the planet’s fourth-largest car-making nation, with an output of more than four million vehicles. It is expected to pass Germany in 2005. Even if the 32% rate of expansion recorded in the first six months of this year slows by half, the national bureau of statistics forecasts that China’s capacity will soar to 10-million vehicles by the end of the decade.
Much of the output is for export, but China’s rising middle class is also keen to get behind the wheel. Once considered a privilege only for senior government and Communist Party officials, now 60% of new cars are bought by individuals.
‘Ten years ago, I never dreamed I’d own a car, so when my husband told me we could buy one earlier this year, I didn’t believe him at first,” said Wang Min, one of the visitors to the motor show. ‘It is a big step up in society.”
It is changing China. The popular image of city streets filled with bicycles might have been true as recently as 1990, when there were only one million cars in the country, but that number has since surged tenfold, breaking through the 10-million level earlier this year. Now bicycle lanes are frequently used for overtaking by the growing ranks of inexperienced, impatient and accident-prone new drivers.
To accommodate the doubling of cars in the capital over the past five years, two huge new ring roads have been added to the three already in existence. A sixth is planned for completion ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but it may not be enough.
By international standards, of course, China’s car market is still immature. Even in affluent Beijing, only one in 20 families has a car. Among the national population of 1,2-billion, the average is one in 120 people, which has given manufacturers optimism that there is plenty of room for growth.
Huge sums of foreign investment are now pouring in. Volkswagen, the market leader, has made China its global priority. Over the next five years, it will invest €6-billion in its joint venture with local partner First Automotive Works to build two new factories, more than double production and raise annual sales to a million units.
Shanghai General Motors aims to expand production more than tenfold to produce three million cars by 2012. Hyundai, Nissan and BMW are also ramping up capacity. Even Toyota, which was initially sniffy about the Chinese market, has announced plans for a new partnership with Guangshou Automotive Group that would initially raise its output in China from 5 000 to 25 000 cars.
As well as the big international players, small domestic car firms are springing up across China. Of the 123 car factories nationwide, only 18 have a capacity of more than 50 000 units. Some can only make a few hundred vehicles a year.
Government leaders have been warning against overheating in production. There are certainly deflationary signs of overcapacity as dealers are flooded with more new models than they can sell.
According to the People’s Bank of China, prices for domestic cars fell by 2,4% last year. Even so, they are still out of the reach of the masses. Only in Shanghai — China’s wealthiest and most modern city — is the average wage above the $1 000 level at which consumers can think about buying a car. However, with prices falling and wages rising, industry executives expect urban demand to keep growing at a world beating rate.
‘The car-buying trend will certainly continue to soar and the auto industry will witness an explosive growth in China’s major cities in the coming years,” said Zhang Xiaoyu, the deputy director of the China Machinery Industry Federation.
Not every consumer, however, is convinced that this revolution was a good thing. As she gazed upon the highlight of the car show — a yellow Lamborghini — Wang wondered aloud whether her family’s new car had made them happier.
‘It has changed our lives, but not necessarily for the better,” said the 32-year-old wife of a Shanghai broker. ‘In theory we can now drive to all sorts of great places — but in practice my husband is hardly ever free at the weekends because he has to work so much harder to pay for the money we borrowed to buy the car.”
One can only wonder what road — and indeed what model — Mao would have advised her to take. —