HONG KONG — General Motors now sells far more Buicks in China than in the United States, partly by playing on its history as the brand in which Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, was chauffeured around.
It turns out, however, that the Ford Motor Company had a chance nearly 90 years ago to become Dr. Sun’s favorite brand — and missed it.
Dr. Sun, a medical doctor and revolutionary who briefly became the first president of China in 1912, wrote to Henry Ford in 1924, in an exchange of letters released in Hong Kong by Ford Motor on Sunday night.
A top Nationalist Party official in southern China by then, Dr. Sun invited Mr. Ford to create an industrial empire in China even bigger than his operations in the United States, where Ford Motor was still the market leader.
But an assistant in Mr. Ford’s office sent Dr. Sun a terse rejection, acknowledging receipt of the invitation but saying, “We desire to advise, however, that Mr. Ford has made no plans for visiting China in the very near future.”
Dr. Sun spent many years of his youth in Hong Kong, attending medical school here and becoming deeply involved in organizing revolutionary activities. The territory was then a British colony, beyond the reach of imperial China’s law enforcement and intelligence apparatus. Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997.
Ford Motor released copies of Dr. Sun’s correspondence from the archives of the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., ahead of the company’s planned bid on Monday for regulatory approval to become a government-approved provider of taxis in Hong Kong.
The city has nearly 18,000 taxis, 98 percent of them supplied by Toyota, with Nissan providing virtually all of the rest. Ford Motor is trying to win approval of the Ford Transit Connect, a compact minivan manufactured in Valencia, Spain.
Ever since China’s civil war ended in 1949 with a Communist victory and the retreat of the Nationalists to Taiwan, one of the few points both sides could agree on was that Dr. Sun played a central role in the founding of modern China. Although Dr. Sun was a Nationalist, the Communists have also revered him as one of their intellectual forefathers.
Ford has bet heavily on the mainland Chinese market and is rapidly expanding there, but also continues to do well in Taiwan. Releasing the documents in Hong Kong, where Taiwanese and mainland Chinese officials sometimes meet secretly at a nearly neutral location, may allow Ford Motor to sidestep sometimes acrimonious arguments from both sides over who are the true modern political heirs to Dr. Sun.
G.M. has thrived in China, thanks mainly to its Buick brand, which the company frequently ties to Dr. Sun in its marketing. G.M. shipped 71,002 Buicks to dealers in China last month — compared to only 15,623 Buicks in the United States.
Ford Motor has lagged far behind in China, mainly because G.M. was ahead of most rivals in winning regulatory permission in 1997 to open a Buick assembly plant in Shanghai. Foreign entry into the Chinese auto market was still severely restricted then. G.M. relentlessly emphasized its connection to Dr. Sun at the time, portraying Buick as returning to a market where it had a big presence in the 1920s and 1930s. G.M. mentions less often that the preferred car of China’s last imperial ruler, Emperor Pu Yi, was also a Buick.
But Ford has begun catching up, with sales in China up 61 percent in September from a year earlier, compared to a gain of 14 percent for G.M.
As for Dr. Sun’s letter, it may have been prophetic in warning that China needed help to address its weak economy, or else it could attract foreign intervention that would sow the seeds of another world war. Japan grabbed part of northeastern China in 1931 and a full-scale war began between China and Japan in 1937.
The war set off a spiral of hostility in East Asia, with an American trade embargo against Japan followed by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. The bombing drew the United States into World War II and turned the Pacific into one of the theaters of that war.
Ford has a negligible market share in Japan and no assembly plants there. In addition to the highly competitive auto factories that are already there, extensive regulations in Japan set unique standards for even mundane equipment like headlights. These nontariff trade barriers have made it largely uneconomical for international automakers to ship cars to Japan.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/business/international/after-89-years-ford-wants-a-second-chance-in-china.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bradsher,%20Keith?ref=keithbradsher&pagewanted=print
