Car Culture Captivates China

Where once he used to travel to Shanghai perhaps once a week to buy goods for his store, he had made nine such trips in the first two weeks after he bought the QQ. "My business is more efficient now," he said.

China's embrace of the private automobile parallels the country's shift from its Communist past toward a market-defined future. Once, the state provided the daily goods of life such as housing and transport. Now, people are left to fend for themselves while freed to pursue their own path.

Before China began its economic transition in the early 1980s, the sole buyer of vehicles was the state. Other than party officials, whose vehicles were provided through their jobs, virtually no one owned a car. By 1998, less than a third of car purchases were made by private individuals and families, according to the State Information Center. Last year, the number jumped to 65 percent. The latest development has families going back to the dealer for a second vehicle.

Chen's experience mirrors the unfolding of China's car culture. Now 30, she grew up in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, where her Shanghainese mother moved during the early 1960s. They lived in the provincial capital, Urumqui, in a simple flat provided by her mother's company, which supported the operations of the military. Her father drove a city bus.

In 1989, Chen was sent back to Shanghai for school. After high school, she took a job at a real estate developer, marrying a Shanghainese who had his own real estate plans. They moved into a one-bedroom apartment and commuted to work by taxi.

By 1997, Chen's husband had his own company. Business was brisk. He took his winnings and bought a Toyota Camry, an import. In August that year, their son was born. Shortly thereafter, they moved into a new, 19th-story, four-bedroom apartment in the Xujiahui area, an imposing collection of towers and department stores, paying about $175,000.

They looked out at a city being transformed by cranes. They could see as far as the Huangpu River to the east, where colonial banks sprung up on the promenade known as the Bund in the decades before the revolution. To the west, villas and apartment blocks were going up in the suburbs.

Now, her husband drove himself to work. They began buying their groceries at Metro, a German owned retail chain that has delivered Western-style grocery shopping to China, returning with cases of cola and economy size boxes of laundry detergent.

"Before, we shopped only in the neighborhood," Chen said, recalling trips to open air markets with meat hanging from butcher stalls and peasant women squatting vegetables brought in from the countryside "We'd buy only when we actually needed something. Now, we anticipate need and buy a lot in advance." In recent years, her husband's company has prospered and Chen has risen to an executive position at her company. The couple set their sites on the next landmark on the Chinese path of upward mobility -- getting out of the city center. While hundreds of millions of farmers are now abandoning the countryside in search of work in the cities, China's wealthy have adopted an attitude not unlike their counterparts in more developed countries: They yearn for lawns.

Last year came the chance. Another firm owed Chen's husband's company money. It offered to settle up by handing over the villa in the exclusive community, worth about $500,000. They hope to move in later this year.

"Now, we have a big apartment building with lots of other people and elevators," Chen says. "Soon, it will be our private house, with a private garden." Life beyond the crush of the city requires that both spouses have regular access to a car. So, last summer, Chen's husband completed their suburban existence with a special birthday gift, the BMW.

"It gave me the feeling that my husband really loves me," she says, looking ahead to the day she can park it in the driveway in front of her newly renovated home, joining the two Porsches, the Mercedes and the Audi fronting others on the private lane.

Special correspondent Wang Ting contributed to this report.