Desperately seeking cars

Fifteen years ago, you couldn't even own a car in China. Now everyone wanting to buy one. Carole Cadwalladr went to the Beijing car show to find out more. WHAT becomes immediately apparent on entering the 10th annual Beijing car show is the emotional intensity with which China has thrown itself into its greatest consumerist passion to date: the first throes of an affair with the car.

The entire nation, it turns out, is in love with them, is in thrall to them, is possibly thinking about buying one.

Or so it seems, as I attempt to make my way to the Ferrari stand, where I've been promised a delivery ceremony is about to be performed, my nose squashed into some man's armpit, my ribs flattened by the weight of what feels like a billion people pressing in on every side. I'd always known that there were a lot of people in China - I just wasn't expecting to meet them all on my first day.

Not quite everybody, I discover afterwards, merely 600,000 of them. All of them looking at cars, being photographed next to cars, picking up brochures of cars, getting into the driving seats of cars and shifting the gears and stroking the upholstery and opening and closing the boot.

I miss the delivery ceremony on account of the armpits, but I discover it's standard procedure in China, and the next day at Beijing's Mini dealership they perform one especially for me. It feels a bit like I'm getting married.

There's a whole lot of people wishing me good luck and shaking my hand, a bag full of Mini-related gifts, flowers and, finally, a photograph of me and my loved one - my hand resting on the shapely bonnet of a Mini Cooper - which is later mounted in a Perspex frame and presented with a flourish. You don't just buy a car in China, it seems. You are emotionally wedded to it.

There are 890 different cars on display at the show, made by more than 225 different manufacturers, some of which I've heard of - Ford, Mercedes Benz, Toyota - and some of which I haven't.

Fifteen years ago, you couldn't even own a car. The country is now the second biggest car market in the world, and for millions of Chinese window-shopping for their family's first set of wheels, this is their consumer revolution.

My companion, Martin Parr, a photographer, looks like a child in a sweetshop. His latest big project is documenting luxury, and specifically the developing world's response to it, and the spectacle of the crowds and the cars and the models draped over them in the vast halls of the New China International Exhibition Centre has sent him into overdrive. "Isn't it fantastic?" he says.

It is. It's just so big. There are hundreds of stands, thousands of people.

At the Chery stand, I stop and catch my breath and talk to a rare breed, an English-speaking salesman called Andy Wang.

Chery, it turns out, is one of the biggest and most successful car manufacturers in China and its aim now, according to Andy, is to 'push it out all over the world.'

The brand has already arrived in Bahrain.

Andy is so enthusiastic that he gives me a full tour in which he points out all the special features and then shows me on a map all the other places Chery exports to.

He's just detailing the benefits of the anti-locking brakes when I ask him if he has a car.

"Yes, of course, I can drive a car! After graduation, I drove in my company. We learn in one week. I find it very easy for me to drive a car."

But do you own a car?

"Ah. I wish! But it's a lot of money, but one day, yes!"

Andy, it turns out, is the sort of average Chinese consumer who makes Western CEOs drool. His parents worked in a factory until they set up their own business. Nobody in his family has ever owned a car, but it's what he aspires to and one day soon may be able to afford. According to the chief executive of GM, a salary of BD1,200, or the average annual income of households in China's mid-level cities, is the threshold at which people start to think about buying a car.

Estimates vary, but it is believed that around 30 in every 1,000 people in China own a vehicle, which, as the New Yorker has pointed out, is roughly what it was in the US in 1915. The potential for growth is the stuff of an automobile executive's dreams. And an environmentalist's worst nightmare. North-east China already has the highest levels of nitrogen dioxide pollution anywhere in the world.

Chery, it turns out, is China's Ford; the Chery QQ, its Model T. It's a tiny slip of a car, a 'micro sub-compact' in the jargon, which was launched in 2003 and costs just BD1,500: officially China's cheapest car.

More than that, it was the car that China had been waiting for. The newly burgeoning middle classes embraced it and Chery's sales leapt by 80 per cent.

Looks-wise, you might just recognise it, as it's a pretty much an identical copy of a Daewoo Matiz as owned by a very unhappy General Motors. The company was furious, having bought the Korean company with the intention of relaunching the Matiz as the Chrysler Spark, but were beaten to the punch by the QQ, and although they filed legal papers they didn't get very far on account of the fact that Chery is owned by the government.

It also seems to have set something of a precedent. I'm not much of a car expert, but even I can spot a Mini, although it turns out to be not a Mini at all but a Lifan 320; a Smart Car which isn't, it's a Shuanghuan Noble; and a rather fantastic copy of a Hummer made by the Dongfeng Corporation which looks the part but I'm not sure you'd necessarily want to test it under enemy fire in the Iraqi desert.

And there, in the luxury hall, is a familiar-looking badge belonging to a company called Roewe. I'm not sure I'd have recognised it but Martin Parr comes bounding up to find me. "Look! It's a Rover!"

It is, or at least it's the Chinese son of Rover risen from the ashes of the British plant. When MG Rover went bust three years ago, a Chinese company, the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, had already bought the intellectual property rights to the Rover 75, 25 and all the engines, and Nanjing Automobile Corporation bought the MG name, IPR and the factories.

Liu Tao, Roewe's brand director, leads me to the back of the stand, where there is a 'Roewe Taste Tea House' and young men dressed like James Bond serve English tea in bone china teacups, just like they do in England.

Roewe is how the Chinese pronounce Rover, Tao says (the company wanted the Rover name, someone else tells me, but ballsed up at the last minute), and the Roewe 750 is essentially the Rover 75. "Only we make some changes; China's roads and habits are different. And from a styling point of view ... we've changed the rear end, because people here like a bigger boot. And we have more modern interior trends. The Rover 75 was a bit ...'Old-fashioned?''We call it classic."

So there you have it. A Roewe 750 costs BD9,000, has a very smart suede interior and at some point in the near future will probably be available once again in Bahrain.

To own a car in China is already to be rich beyond the dream of most people. But as any good Western consumer knows, this is not enough. What kind of car you own speaks volumes in any country, let alone in one whose business dealings revolve around the concept of "face" - keeping it, losing it.