07.29.08

Welcome to Wenzhou, Watch out for Speeding BMW’s!

Posted in Business 'n Economics at 9:52 am by Benjamin Ross

The other day as I was attempting cross the street in front of my friend’s Wenzhou apartment, I was almost run down by a white BMW 750. I scurried over to the median in the middle of the road, and was looking to cross to the other side, when I heard the blare of another car horn racing towards me, this one a Jet black Mercedes-Benz sedan. I finally made it to the other side of the street, but not before I was nearly hit by an oncoming Porsche SUV. Dodging speeding vehicles is nothing out of the ordinary in the Middle Kingdom. But what was odd was that all of the vehicles I was bombarded with were German designed and worth hundreds of thousands of RMB.

Located in Zhejiang province in Southeastern China, Wenzhou is one of the wealthiest cities in China. When China began the process of Reform and Opening Up, Wenzhou was one of the earlier (and most successful) cities to establish trade relations with the West. Today, a large percentage of shoes and textiles in Italy and France all originate in this once humble Zhejiang coastal town. As the local economy boomed, many of Wenzhou’s people found themselves in the right place at the right time, and today are now swimming in a veritable pool of money far too deep for them to ever spend away.

After my street crossing incident, I decided to do a little of my own research. I took a stroll through the parking lot nearest to my friend’s apartment and took a record all of the parked cars. Here’s what I saw.

The white BMW with black tints, the de facto official vehicle of Wenzhou

BMW 760
Mazda 3
Mercedes-Benz C200
Hafei HFJ7110 (Chinese make)
Buick Excel
Honda Accord
Hyundai Excel
Toyota Camry
Buick Excel
Toyota Camry
BMW 520
Audi A4
Honda Accord
Peugeot
Buick Excel
Mercedes-Benz S350
Chinese Minivan (unsure of the make)
Audi A6
Volkswagen Polo
Hyundai (didn’t see the model)
Mazda 3
Toyota Ruiz

I broke the vehicles down into 4 categories, and here’s what I came up with.

Japanese/Korean mid-size: 9
Buicks: 3
German Luxury Cars: 6
Everything else: 4

Unsurprisingly Japanese/Korean mid-sizes came out on top with 41%. but the number which stuck out most was the full 27% which were all German luxury models! Another common make was the Buick, long regarded as a geezermobile in the US, but widely popular in China, which took 13.5%. One car which was absent from this list (and conspicuously rare in Wenzhou), is the QQ, China’s homegrown version of the Yugo, which can be purchased for under $10,000 USD. In many cities in China, the QQ is now the most common car on the road. In Wenzhou, that honor would probably go to the BMW 5 series, or Mercedes S Class.

While this sample size is far too small to draw any scientifically bound conclusions, it is still quite representative of what I saw during my five days in Wenzhou. Car ownership alone is still a somewhat superfluous way to judge wealth, but it does give an idea of the amount of money that is floating around this once non-descript Southern Chinese city. If you do ever make it down to Wenzhou, just make sure you don’t get hit by an oncoming BMW 760. I hear the V12 packs on a lot of extra weight.

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