ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the key issue of innovation transforming the system of urban mobility, beyond the dominant late twentieth century model centred on the 'steel-and-petroleum' auto-mobility of the privately-owned internal combustion engine (ICE) car and all that is entailed for its easy, common-sense, everyday use as a system of mobility. Urban mobility is a key case study for many reasons. The chapter traces the optimist, pessimist, disruptor and innovation-as-politics arguments regarding mobility system innovation in China. In this case, though, this involves several overlapping stages regarding an inescapably broadening purview of the relevant socio-technologies in our domain of interest, urban mobility. The starting point is the electric car, embraced by Chinese policy as the once-in-a-generation opportunity for China to break into the global oligopoly at the peak of contemporary hi-tech manufacturing that is the car industry.
