Prelude to Chinas leapfrog gambit

As the global financial crises of 2007-2009 approached, the central government of China had made only modest progress building a globally competitive auto industry, despite more than fifteen years of concerted national industrial policy. China’s domestic automakers gained some ground in the Chinese market and established some export markets in Russia, Asia and the Middle East. The grand visions of exports of Chinese cars to North America and Europe were unrealized. The industry’s near-term challenge in 2009 was not a flood of imported cars from Japan and the West, as China applied the 25% tariffs permitted in its 2001 deal to enter the WTO. Foreign automakers engaged in joint ventures with Chinese automakers to dominate China’s home market. Those joint ventures did not lead to adequate technology transfer and long-term independence of Chinese automakers. Nor was the central government’s goal of consolidation into a handful of large state-owned automakers realized. The number of new entrants proliferated while a largely unplanned private auto industry flourished. The parts sector achieved significant successes in exports, in part because foreign parts makers established facilities in China and exported from those facilities to markets around the world. China’s penetration of the global market for high-valued automotive parts grew but remained limited. China’s R&D made progress on New Energy Vehicles, especially with regard to BEVs. Consequently, some officials in the central government began to see an innovative path forward for the Chinese industry by leapfrogging the internal combustion engine to a PEV-dominated industry. As the global economy entered in 2007 the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the possibility that the Chinese auto industry might use NEVs to leapfrog the established global automakers was entertained by some Chinese elites but was not yet a major concern of the established global automakers or their governmental allies.