As many of you know, I lived in China for around 14 years including a couple of stints as a student, in 1984 in Nanjing and in 1991-93 in Kunming (I was teaching English and studying Chinese concurrently part of that stint).
I moved back to Greater China — since Hong Kong was still British at the time – in 1996 to do an internship at the Asian Wall Street Journal. I won’t go through all the permutations of my China journalism career so let’s leapfrog to 2001, when I started doing some stories for Automotive News as a Shanghai-based stringer. I became a staff reporter a few years later.
Now that I’ve laid the groundwork, since there is a lot of talk in the U.S. auto industry about when, not if, Chinese automakers will enter the U.S. market, I thought I’d revisit my reporting from the time when China was way behind Western automakers in automotive technology and muse about how the times have changed. How did we get here from there? This will be a series so don’t expect an answer right away.
So, without further ado, I give you the early days of the GM partnership with SAIC Wuling!
I was the first!
I was the first foreign journalist to visit Wuling’s headquarters in Liuzhou, China (hattip to Yale Zhang, who helped make that possible). Liuzhou Wuling Automobile Company was a provincial mini-van maker before the formation of the SAIC GM Wuling joint venture (SGMW) in 2002. When I visited, the negotiations to form that JV were just being finalized.
The Wuling I visited has many outer vestiges of its old state-owned days including disused railroad tracks running into the plant and piles of coal still left from when it was burned to heat and light the minivan plant. Even before the JV was formed however, Wuling’s manufacturing process was already transforming using the GM system.
Wuling formed the JV because, as General Manager Shen Yang told me at the time, it was not ready to compete with foreign rivals who would enter the market after China’s WTO entry in December 2001. To quote my Automotive News story of November 11, 2001, “The Chinese automaker does not have the money or engineering expertise to design modern vehicles.”
The Wuling partnership was an early harbinger of how foreign automakers would fall behind in the domestic market and also an example of how foreign automakers cluelessly missed the EV (or NEV, I should say) train in China.
To be sure, even before Chinese automakers took over the domestic market through their dominant electric vehicle technology, SGMW was important to General Motors’ China operation. I wrote a ChinaEV blog in November 2012 titled “To see the future for GM in China look at the SAIC-GM-Wuling joint venture.”
Then, SGMW already accounted for more than half of GM China’s sales. And it still does. Of the 2.1 million vehicles GM sold in China in 2023, 1.2 million were from SGMW.
And you know what? SGMW sells a bunch of electric vehicles. It produced one of the first BEVs in China, the Baojun100. And it makes the best-selling BEV in China, the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV.
So one might ask, how did GM miss the EV train in China so badly with its own nameplates? I can only surmise that hubris played a big role. So, that’s all for now.