NEWS FLASH: “Government pledges support to struggling auto industry in lead up to economic stimulus measures.” Nope, this is not old news about bailing out General Motors & Co. Nor is it coming from Washington.

The country involved is not one which, after years of building the world’s most vast network of roads; issuing policies that invited petroleum dependence instead of effective public transportation; and allowing 1950s-inspired city planners to go nuts buildings suburban communities so sprawled and removed from the cities that getting to the store requires not just owning and driving a car, but driving it 20 minutes from your home. We don’t mean the U.S.  Nope, we’re talking about China. [insert “wtf” reaction here]

China was once anecdotely known as the “kingdom of bicycles” due to their overwhelming prevalence. Not only were bicycles a definitive status symbol, but city streets so accommodated bicycle traffic that human-, not gas-powered, wheels were the most efficient means of transport. Now, Chinese have decided that the American dream of a car in every garage is one too beguiling a symbol of modernity to resist, despite the physical, not to mention environmental, impracticalities involved.

Whether China will avoid “mak[ing] the same mistakes we did,” as Secretary of State Clinton exhorted during her recent trip to Beijing, will depend, then, on how the stimulus is used. China’s electric car manufacturers in-the-making are lobbying China’s decision makers hard for extra subsidies. Is the Chinese government ready to pledge bold support for more environmentally-friendly vehicles?

The planet’s second largest car market and manufacturer: the story of Chinese oil & autos

The story of how China has become the world’s 2nd largest car market and manufacturer – production exceeded 7 million cars last year, surpassing Germany and surpassed only by the US and Japan, while over 20 million private-owned cars and 41 million private-owned motor vehicles (includes three wheel vehicles and low-speed trucks) populate the roads, according to official government statistics – is a, well, exhaustive one.

In the course of China’s concord-speed flight through 100 years of development in less than 30, fossil fuel dependency was culled from a domestic oil boom that sprang to the surface early on – at the peak, China churned out 2 million barrels per day (bpd), becoming the fourth largest oil producer outside the Middle East – but soon dried up.

Above: USA #1, CHINA #2.

Once China’s estimates of offshore reserves proved disappointingly smaller than expected, and high oil prices sank back down in the late 1970s, China abandoned earlier plans to harness oil production as a means for economic growth. But, by this point, the seed of oil dependence had been planted, and the roots of an automobile-centered society would soon begin to take hold.

China careened onto the world stage as a source of low-cost manufacturing in the late 1980s. As China’s neighbors began climbing the manufacturing ladder, producing more high skilled, capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive goods, and Deng Xiaoping encouraged economic reform, production shifted to the mainland. Textile and other industries thus migrated to China from the Asian Tiger countries – Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. The manufacturing sector helped China employ its rural millions (or, rather, hundreds of millions) and grow the economy for nearly 20 years.

But by the late 1990s, China, yearned to follow its East Asian neighbors’ footsteps; not to replace them as the world’s high-technology center of manufacturing, but to provide China’s increasingly wealthy population with advanced, inexpensive consumer goods produced domestically.

Distinctly homegrown automobile production – previously, the bulk of China’s non-imported vehicles were made by joint ventures anchored by major car makers Volkswagon, GM, Pugeot-Citroen, and DaimlerChrysler – thus became a “gotta have” industry by the new millennium.

As China began building more roadways and constructing better bridges, ground transport facilitated expansion of economic activity. Cities grew in size and variety, and their residents grew accustomed to motor vehicles. Whereas China’s urban dwellers in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s found little need to leave their neighborhood, or even block, for most aspects of daily life, crossing the city to get to work and back, drop kids off at school, or run errands became more the norm by the ’90s. The “danwei” lifestyle, wherein one’s work unit provided housing, education, and medical care literally adjacent to the workplace, had been replaced by a more liberalized economy that drastically altered how individuals used and required space. And so, bicycles became not just less popular, but simply less practical.

In Part II of Auto Zone China, we will outline the scaling up and slimming down of China’s auto industry leading up to, and now in the midst of the economic crisis. We will also search for the environmental silver lining to this tale by looking at China’s automakers’ race to develop and manufacture a newer, better, and cheaper electric automobile.

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