Sri Lanka, July 27 -- In 1954, Mao Zedong said, 'We cannot deny that we are still unable to produce motor cars. We are still very far away from being industrialised'.

He was speaking to an audience of Chinese industrialists and merchants at a time when the country was desperately poor, its resources stretched by decades of Japanese invasion, civil war with the nationalist Kuomintang, and ongoing US aggression in Korea, where China had intervened in support of the forces of national liberation.

Four years later, in 1958, the first Chinese passenger automobile, Dongfeng CA71, rolled off the assembly line of the aptly named state-owned enterprise First Automobile Works in Changchun - a product of China's first five-year plan. Dongfeng mean...