Yahoo Autos Aaron Robinson: China both Creates and Tackles Its Problems Overnight
From the August 2010 issue
From my room high in the Westin Beijing Chaoyang, the dawn-to-dusk ooze of vehicles along the Chinese capital’s 3rd Ring Road looks pretty much like a jam on any Los Angeles freeway. However, it is much noisier. Honking is rare in L.A., no doubt because drivers have surrendered to the circumstances. No one but the rankest newcomer believes that honking—or weaving, or cursing, or praying—will in any way shorten a trip. Plus, in L.A., horn jockeys are occasionally shot at.
China’s auto culture is so new that drivers apparently haven’t lost hope that a journey can be hastened by a well-tooted horn. Indeed, with 4.2 million vehicles in 6489 square miles, Beijing’s vehicle density doesn’t match Los Angeles County’s, which has 7.0 million cars and trucks crammed onto its 4061 square miles of dry land.
But Beijing is rapidly catching up. In the week before the city’s semiannual auto show, 17,000 new vehicles rolled out onto Beijing’s streets, reports the China Daily newspaper. The sprawling city of about 22 million people added almost 1 million vehicles to its roads in the past year alone.
Consider that while L.A. had half a century to braid itself with freeways, Beijing has had barely a decade. Though encircled by concentric ring roads, large swaths of the town are still serviced by the old, narrow thoroughfares where bicycles once ruled. The city is practically paralyzed with traffic, an observation cemented by an 11.3-mile bus ride from the auto show to the hotel that took two hours.
China’s energy resources are also being bled dry. Wang Chuanfu, chairman of Chinese automaker BYD, stated the issue using simple math in the China Automotive Review: “We have 400 million families, and if each family owns a car, it would mean 400 million cars [the U.S. currently has about 250 million]. If each vehicle consumes two tons of oil, that would mean 800 million tons of oil a year. Where do we get all the oil?”
As of this writing, at least some of it could be skimmed right off the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, but the point is made. Ah, but this is China. Problems that erupt overnight are tackled in about the same time, without all that mucking around with Congressional hearings and environmental reports and votes by designated representatives. You know, without democracy.
Need to mobilize a small army and clear space for a small city to stage the grandest Olympic spectacle the world has ever seen? The Communist Party gets it done with a few pen strokes. Need 15,000 miles of brand-new freeways linking the major cities? Give the Party four years, and another four years to double it. Who lives in the freeway’s path? Who cares? Need to convert a fossil-fuel-dependent auto industry to electricity? Simply decree it; give the decree a grand name, such as the Automotive Industry Readjustment and Revitalization Plan (AIRRP); and count on Americans to keep pumping dollars into Walmart—$405 billion in 2009—to fund it.
Handed down last March, the AIRRP is just the kind of industrial lever-pulling we expect from a centrally planned economy. It aims to consolidate the domestic industry of more than 100 automakers into a top 10 that owns 90 percent of the Chinese market. It also spurs demand by cutting purchase taxes and subsidizing sales in rural areas, and promotes increased production of electric vehicles.
Where will the kilowatts come from? Well, China has 17 nuclear reactors under construction and another 124 in design. The country is starting construction of a new nuclear power plant every three months, huffed conservative columnist George Will in the April 19 issue of Newsweek, while the U.S. hasn’t built a nuclear reactor in 30 years.
BMW, which assembles cars in Shenyang and sold about 90,000 vehicles in China last year (and more than twice that amount in the U.S. in 2009), is spending large to develop an entire subbrand of electric machines. The first “Megacity Vehicle” concept may appear later this year. BMW board member Ian Robertson sounded like the German ambassador to China when he described the government’s fiat as a “legislative framework developing here which will encourage EVs on a scale we won’t see in other markets.”
Act in haste, repent in leisure, holds the old maxim. In the new China, they act in haste and then repent in haste, and then order everyone back to work. In comparison, modern America moves at a glacial pace.
Planning for Boston’s “Big Dig” freeway relocation started in 1982; the final off-ramp was completed in early 2006. Meanwhile,
L. A. just wrapped up a $167 million widening of its clogged west-side artery. The 4.5-mile project took five years. Of course, a Chinese-style “legislative framework” wouldn’t fly here. In our system, we let the future wait while we argue and lobby and campaign and vote and litigate our way in a slowly tumbling mass of competing interests and biases. That’s just what the Constitution’s authors intended: restraint. When reading about China’s feats of mobilization, it’s worth remembering how we are different.
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