China's Secret Weapon
CHINA'S SECRET WEAPON
ROUNDUP
EVER HEARD OF ZONGshen? At the second round of the FIM Endurance World Championship held in early May at the Auto-dromo Brno in the Czech Republic, a Suzuki GSX-R1000 sponsored by this Chinese motorcycle manufacturer finished second in the Superproduction class. Why is Zongshen racing? To raise exposure outside China for Zongshen and the Chinese motorcycle industry.
A similar scenario took place in Japan in the late 1940s and ’50s. Now, it’s happening in China. Eve expected it for years, and now it’s real: Chinese motorcycles. Millions and millions of them. Japan’s peak year of production was 1980, in which six million bikes were produced. China built 11 million last year.
Every market worldwide is now flooded with Chinese goods: clothing, housewares, shoes, tools. Zongshen, a Chongqing company, built one million motorcycles and two million engines last year. Established in 1992 by Zuo Zongshen, this group has reinvested much of its income in R&D facilities. More than 100 Ph.D. holders are employed among the 18,000-member staff. The latest in CNC machining, finite element analysis and other modern technologies are in daily use. This, too, parallels the early history of the Japanese motorcycle industry.
As was the case in Japan at the beginning, most of these machines are small-bore utility models-basic transportation. But be-
cause of China’s new market economy, large numbers of Chinese can now afford more than
the basics. And some of China’s 250 producers of motorcycles see home-market saturation on the far horizon. To keep expanding, they must do what the Japanese did before them: export to new markets overseas.
Beijing #6 Auto Works produced the first Chinese motorcycles in 1950 for the Chinese Army. More than 4000 Zundapp 500 copies, called Jing Gang Shan, were built by 1954. Later, copies of Russian copies of military BMWs were built, and in 1970, 10 producers were manto make Jawa 250cc for the post office. By 1980, production of motorcyes was barely 50,000-a tiny for China’s huge population. Then, the Chinese government launched its present adventure into market capitalism. No one is sharper than a Chinese businessman, as Boeing officials discovered years ago when they set out to sell airliners to what they thought would be provincial communist ideologues. Soon, their ears were ringing with clauses and subclauses-as tough a negotiation as they’d ever been through.
Just as Soichiro Honda took his team of quaint little 125cc Twins to the Isle of Man in 1959, so Zongshen began racing in 1999-but with Honda RC45s. Now, it’s built its own liquidcooled 750cc V-Twin, which is in part based upon Suzuki components. These people are not operating in a vacuum, but study and understand the foreign press thoroughly. China is no longer isolated. The Zongshen 750 has a fashionably steep steering head, an aluminum beam chassis and modern-looking components.
Zongshen is racing a Suzuki now, but it looks toward the day when Chinese-designed-andbuilt motorcycles will roll onto the world’s starting grids. We have to take this seriously because China is one of the last great open markets for cigarettes. Western producers are in that market in force, which means that future televised Chinese Grands Prix will be heavily supported by them. Money makes the world go aroundeven in Communist China.
-Kevin Cameron
