ABSTRACT
The word ‘car’ in Mandarin, qiche, literally ‘vapour vehicle’, comes from the word che, ‘cart’ or ‘chariot’. The traditional Chinese character 車 looks like a cart, as seen from above, without its horse or ox, and qi, the word for ‘vapour’, contains the water symbol to the left 汽. These ‘vapour vehicles’ (some early autos were actually steam powered) first appeared in China in the early twentieth century. A Hungarian man reportedly imported the first car to Shanghai in 1901 (Dikötter 2006, 90), although a Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Centre photograph shows the first car in Shanghai in 1903. In 1902, Commander Yuan Shikai (later president), gave the Empress Dowager Cixi a Benz in Beijing (Dikötter 2006, 90). Photographs from the 1930s in the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Centre show dozens of cars parked along the Bund, and by the 1940s satirical cartoons, such as Zhang Leping’s, which featured the homeless orphan boy San Mao, show the difficulties of trying to cross a busy street through car traffic (Zhang 1948). In the early twentieth century, cars in China, as elsewhere, were only for the elites who could afford them. Yet by the 1920s, as in the US and Germany (Seiler 2008; Sachs 1992), there arose a dream of mass automobility. In 1922, China’s Nationalist founding father, Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan), called forth the modernist dream of ‘one car per every man’ (Sun 1929, 219). Sun’s dream of mass automobility, however, was deferred. After Chinese Communist victory in 1949 and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, private cars were banned. Ironically, although the Communists had used images of cars as symbols to critique Nationalist corruption, after victory, only high-ranking Communist Party and government officials had access to chauffeur-driven cars (Notar 2014). By the 1980s, 50 to 80 per cent of Chinese urbanites commuted by bicycle (Gaubatz 1999, 43-44). However, after China designated the auto industry as one of the ‘key pillars’ of the economy in 1991 (CAE 2003), Chinese auto production and consumption has grown exponentially. By 2009, China became both the world’s largest car market and world’s largest producer of cars and vehicles (China Daily 2013). This chapter describes China’s urban transformation from cities once dominated by bicycles – from the 1950s to the 1990s – to cities now dominated by cars. In the context of China’s rise to become the second largest economy in the
world, its auto industry has been designated as one of the key ‘pillar’ industries (CAE 2003, 1; Chu 2011), and millions of new drivers are now ‘hitting the road’ each year (Conover 2006; Gerth 2010, 2016; Zhang 2009). As China embraces this ‘system of automobility’ (Urry 2004), or what Catherine Lutz calls the ‘car system’ – ‘the complex that includes the quasi-private and embodied technology of the car, governance practices, changed time-space conceptions, and landscapes of affordance to the car’ (Lutz 2014, 232) – new vehicle sales have surpassed those in the US (China Daily 2009). With millions of new drivers, it is perhaps not surprising that traffic accidents have become the leading cause of death for people under 45 (China Daily 2011). How did this shift from a society characterised by bicycle mobility to one characterised by automobility occur? What are the implications of this new system for ideas about space and place, and mobility and status? As an anthropologist of China I am asking, what does it mean for a society to transform itself from one dominated by walking, biking and taking public transport – to one dominated by automobiles? What does it mean to have millions of new vehicles and millions of new drivers enter the landscape in the span of a few years? Below I provide some background on the political and economic factors that have shaped China’s transformation from a society of bicycle mobility to one characterised by automobility. Then I provide a brief overview of auto production and consumption. Next, I discuss some of the profound changes in urban space, place and public health before examining some of the less obvious temporal transformations: in addition to spending time stuck in traffic jams, elites as well as a new middle class in China are spending time doing things they never did before: going car and car decoration shopping, going on road trips, and even going drag racing.
