China’s automotive industry has changed profoundly in the 11 years since I started the research for this book. This study focuses on how industrial modernization in the country’s leading automotive production centers, Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Changchun, Hubei province, and Tianjin has generated lasting changes of national and global impact.

 

The book is foremost a study of the decisions that high-level Chinese officials took in figuring out how best to modernize an outdated passenger car industry. The emphasis is on state policy and the power relations involving industrial planners in Beijing and key Chinese auto enterprises, on the one side, and the major foreign automotive firms, on the other. This accounts for the subtitle, The Party-State and Multinational Corporations, in this study of China’s Automotive Modernization. The changes in the Chinese automotive industry are used as the context to analyze China’s industrial redevelopment and integration into the global economy.

 

As a window for understanding the relationship between globalization and the state's pursuit of national industrial development, this book examines how and why the Chinese government succeeded in leveraging China's international competitive advantages to modernize the country's automotive industry from 1978 to 2001.