China Road

Cars are on the rise in the world’s most populous country, with ever more Chinese dreaming of four wheels of their own. How many cars they buy, and the fuels they use, hold high stakes not only for China, but also for the rest of the planet.

By Kathleen Holder

The Lu family in rural Shanghai uses scant energy—their spacious house is unheated, they cook on a wood stove, wash their clothes by hand and shower once a week at a public facility. But life is dramatically changing in their village as new factories have sprung up. The father now earns 75 cents an hour at an air-conditioning manufacturing plant—a pay increase from when he worked government-owned farm fields that now lie unplanted. While he and his wife received only a primary school education, their son became the first in his high school class to go to college and now attends graduate school. The Lus use only a little gasoline to ride their scooters to town to shop, but pictures taped to the son’s bedroom walls point to another future: They are all magazine cut-outs of cars.

For Jonathan Weinert, a UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies graduate student who met the Lus while researching transportation in Shanghai, the lives and dreams of such emerging middle-class families are key to where China is going—and whether it tries to get there by gasoline-powered car.

“These are the people, rising to the middle class, who are going to make the biggest difference in China’s energy use over the next 30 years,” said Weinert, who sees cause for hope in most Chinese people’s frugal use of fuel and cause for alarm in the country’s environmental neglect.

Automobiles—still out of reach for the vast majority of Chinese families—could tip the balance. With bicycles and electric scooters far outnumbering passenger cars and little national investment in a petroleum-based transportation system, China could either leapfrog the rest of the world to clean-energy fuels or become the leading nation for conventional cars, gasoline consumption and carbon-dioxide emissions. UC Davis scholars such as Weinert are working with Chinese colleagues to study current trends and clean-air options.

Car ownership in China is low by global standards, but rising. There are about 30 million cars and light trucks among 1.3 billion people in China—a rate far below that of the United States, which leads the world with more than 240 million cars and light trucks, or about eight vehicles for every 10 people. China’s per capita rate is about the same as that of the U.S. in 1910, according to Jason Ni, a UC Davis graduate student in transportation technology and policy who is conducting research on Chinese car buyers. Bicycles in China, on the other hand, exceed 500 million.

Ni is conducting surveys, with the help of local university students, about car-buyers in China to learn who is buying and the factors that influence their decisions.

In a targeted pilot survey of 116 relatively affluent people in Shanghai, 24 said they had recently bought a car, while 32 had purchased bicycles, 25 electric or liquefied petroleum gas bikes and scooters, five motorcycles and 30 who had made no recent vehicle purchases. The car buyers in the survey reported monthly incomes of 9,184 yuan, or about $1,100 U.S.—double the average income for the group overall and nearly five times that of the bicycle buyers. Car buyers were also the most likely to have a college education, bicycle buyers the least.

Outside the cities, even fewer people are able to buy a car. With the least expensive costing about $4,000 U.S., car ownership is out of reach for most of the country’s population. The World Bank puts per capita income in China at $1,740, Chinese news sources reported in August.

But with China’s rapid rise to one of the world’s largest economies, car ownership has been accelerating in recent years and, by some projections, could outstrip that of all other countries by 2035. Such projections hold mind-boggling implications—for China, in terms of traffic, parking, smog, noise, roads, manufacturing, energy and other natural resources, and for the rest of the planet, in terms of rising demand for oil and growing emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

This drive toward cars is being fueled by a number of factors.

The Chinese government, as part of its economic development plan, is promoting car manufacturing as a “pillar industry.” Almost all the major international car manufacturers have established joint venture companies in China.

Fast-food restaurants are also banking on China’s growing motorization. McDonald’s and KFC recently announced plans to open a number of drive-through restaurants in China.

“The pressure for more cars is intense,” said Dan Sperling, director of UC Davis’ Institute of Transportation Studies and a new UC Davis China Center on Energy and Transportation. “People desire more mobility and the government wants more industrial investment and jobs. The car industry delivers both. You build a car, you need plastics, rubber, steel and so on. The automotive industry really is a pillar industry for economic growth. The problem is that more cars create serious urban and environmental problems, never mind requiring vast new road infrastructureinvestments.”

Sperling said much of the funding for UC Davis research on China’s transportation comes from car and oil companies, which are looking for data to inform their expansion plans. Little funding is available from either the Chinese or U.S. governments for such studies.

Until a few years ago, there were more rural vehicles in China than urban passenger cars, Sperling said. He has studied China’s unique homespun rural-vehicle industry, which in 2002 produced more than 3 million three-wheeled, one-cylinder diesel cars and trucks—triple the number of conventional cars and trucks. Adapted originally from tractors that farmers used to walk behind, the rural vehicles are “very inefficient but cheap”—and very polluting. “They play a central role in rural development, facilitating a raft of local entrepreneurial activity—from delivery of fresh produce to regional markets to moving construction materials.”

In urban areas, wide income gaps by themselves make it hard to establish emission controls, Weinert said, because the poor can’t afford new, cleaner-running cars. “Vehicles are kept in circulation for a long time,” he said.

At the same time, there are signs of hope for alternative energy vehicles.

The government, host to the 2008 Summer Olympics, is supporting clean-energy initiatives. China has banned gasoline-powered motorcycles, scooters and rural three-wheeled vehicles from many cities because of poor air quality. Five of the 10 cities with the worst air in the world are in China, which along with the U.S. is a leading coal producer.

“China is putting a lot of effort into trying out ethanol and fuel from coal,” Sperling said. “The big question, environmentally, is how they might choose to use coal for fuel. Possibilities include creating electricity to run electric vehicles or a petroleum-like liquid fuel. A cleaner- energy alternative would be to gasify the coal, capturing carbon dioxide and sequestering it underground.”

Tongi University in Shanghai, where UC Davis graduate students Weinert and Ni are based, has a large laboratory devoted to fuel cell and hydrogen technology research. However, Weinert—who originally came to China to study hydrogen fuels—believes hydrogen for commercial use in Shanghai and Beijing is at least 15 years off, longer for the rest of the country.

But Chinese cities have a strong incentive to find alternatives. Superimposing modern roadways into China’s very dense cities, some of them centuries old, is difficult and expensive, Sperling said.

Shanghai, China’s largest city with more than 17 million people and a leading commercial hub, has made other strides in managing vehicles. This port city has about one-tenth as many cars as Beijing, where there are 2 million vehicles for 14 million people. While Beijing has been building a series of “ring road” expressways, Shanghai is investing in mass transit and places restrictions on car ownership, including a $5,000 licensing fee that doubles the cost of the cheapest cars.

In Beijing, Susan Shaheen, Ph.D. ’99—who as a UC Davis graduate student developed a car-sharing pilot program in the San Francisco Bay Area—conducted an 800-person survey and 15 in-depth interviews over the summer to determine consumer interest in car sharing.

Because China is still in the early stages of motorizing, Shaheen says there are opportunities to introduce alternatives to personal car ownership. She is currently a researcher at UC Davis’ Institute of Transportation Studies and UC Berkeley-based California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways.

Weinert, who has been in Shanghai since fall 2005 doing research for his doctorate in transportation technology and policy, sees great promise in electric bicycles, which look like conventional pedal bikes but run on electric motors.

E-bikes are everywhere in China and growing fast in number. While uncommon in other parts of the world, about 10 million were sold in China in 2005, up from 330,000 in 2000. A video Weinert posted on his blog at www.fuelcelltrek.com shows streets in downtown Shijiazhuang, south of Beijing, filled with electric bikes—some carrying two or three people each.

The electric bikes cost about the same as a cell phone to buy, from $100 to $250, and about $1.25 a month to charge. They can travel 100 kilometers on 1.5 kilowatt hours—the equivalent of 1,362 miles per gallon of gasoline, Weinert said.

Whether e-bike owners will seek to move up to cars as their standard of living rises is unclear.

Indeed, it may be an uphill battle for alternatives, as countering forces run srong. Many desire the personal convenience—and the status—of cars.

In language practice sessions at Tongji University, Weinert asked Chinese students what they would do if they had enough money to stop working. “Two out of three said they would first buy a car and go on a road trip,” he said.

Ni said most people who ride bikes or scooters do so out of necessity.

In addition to convenience and personal freedom, car buyers he surveyed in Shanghai also identified a third motivation: They could carry passengers and belongings.

Interviews with car dealers, however, revealed the status power of cars, especially the “two B’s”—BMW and Mercedes Benz. And for the richest of China’s rich, only the top lines will do, he said.

A Beijing BMW dealer told Ni that the dealership’s best-selling model was its largest luxury car. “The BMW sales manager said that wealthy people come into the showroom, and they only want a 7 Series,” Ni said. “They won’t even look at a 3 or a 5 Series.”

Less wealthy buyers tend to shop for other brands like Audi—long the choice for government cars—or Lexus, but they still want the premium models, he said. “Showing off could be the reason.”

Sperling predicts that, for China, “The future holds a lot more cars, a lot more oil use, a lot more traffic congestion, a lot more air pollution and a lot more economic and industrial growth.”

But the researchers note that Americans would do well to focus concern at home as well as abroad.

China’s growing petroleum use has become an international trade issue, with the U.S. blaming China for rising gasoline prices. “But it’s still trivial compared to what Americans consume,” Sperling said. “They’re casting stones in the wrong direction.”

Average oil consumption in China is far lower than the U.S.—216 gallons per person a year, compared to 2,813 gallons for the average American, according to Weinert, who also notes that more developed countries have an important role to play in setting an example.

He predicted that China will wait to see how hydrogen fuels and other clean-air technology play out first in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world. “As the more advanced countries go, so will go China,” Weinert said. “Environmental protection will likely play second fiddle to economic growth for a long time.”

Kathleen Holder is associate editor of UC Davis Magazine.