The morning of Monday, December 29 began as usual for Chen Biao: He woke up, dressed and headed to work at his car dealership in Shenzhen.
Chen recalled anticipating his annual sales commission en route—he’d had a killer year in 2014, despite headlines of unsold inventory piling up at lots across China. 42,000 cars had been issued license plates in Shenzhen during the first 20 days of December, with 460,000 more in the eleven months prior, according to one column at Phoenix News. Doubtless the city’s status as the only remaining megacity on the mainland without a cap on issuing license plates hadn’t hurt. As of late December Shenzhen had about 3.1 million registered private cars, or about one for every five of its 15 million residents, according a Financial Times report.
But by around 4 pm Chen and his colleagues began hearing from sources that Shenzhen was about to announce an annual limit on license plates, effectively capping car sales. Once the news had sunk in, Chen published a wry, mid-winter post on the social-messaging service WeChat: “I think my spring is about to arrive.”
As had been the case with the other megacities of Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai, Chen knew there would inevitably be a buying spree before the new policy went into effect. Soon he and his colleagues were frantically ringing up clients to get them in the showroom before news of the cap on plates went public. Nobody would believe them.
Earlier that year on January 17, state news agency Xinhua had reported that Xu Qin, the mayor of Shenzhen, had announced at the municipality’s annual legislative session that the government would use other economic measures to regulate traffic congestion, like raising parking fees downtown, rather than enforcing a sales cap. Much to Chen’s chagrin, at 5:40 pm, local authorities officially announced they would begin limiting auto license issuance to 100,000 plates a year—starting at 6 pm that day.
With only 20 minutes left on the clock Chen announced via WeChat that he would stay at the dealership until midnight in an attempt to beat the blitzkrieg ban. Nether he nor any of the city’s auto dealers could have known how quickly the cops would show up. To enforce the new policy, local authorities had dispatched police and officials from the Shenzhen price controls department to every auto outlet in the region. And that wasn’t all.
“They didn’t force us to close the store, but they froze our systems and bank accounts,” Chen said. “We couldn’t sell cars.”
As when other cities had their car sales capped, Shenzhen’s new limit drew the ire of many who viewed such policies as ineffective. Lang Yongqiang, an industry columnist with Phoenix News, pointed out that while Beijing’s city government may have deemed its own cap a rousing success after its first six months, today the capital’s roads are still popularly referred to as parking lots. Four years after implementation, Lang said, the average speed of cars during rush hour was 12.3 kilometres an hour (roughly 7.6 mph).
“It’s pathetic that such an ineffective policy hasn’t been ended, and instead has been copied by other cities in the country,” Lang wrote.
The sudden announcement and nigh-instant implementation of the policy drew plenty of criticism as well, with one online survey showing 58% of respondents saying they felt they’d been cheated. The government had previously been strict in its insistence that no cap on license issuance was coming, to the point of arresting those who claimed otherwise. Seven months before the ban, staffers at a car dealer in the city’s Futian district had been detained on charges of spreading rumors and disturbing public order after they flew an ad banner proclaiming, “The cap is coming!”
“Looking back now,” wrote senior columnist Liu Xuesong for the Qianjiang Evening News, “‘the cap is coming’ wasn’t conjecture; rather, that has become the truth. And indeed, claims that authorities ‘absolutely won’t launch a surprise raid’ and ‘explicitly deny that Shenzhen is about to begin a car cap’ have become rumor. One wonders how the dealership staffers who’d been detained felt on hearing this news.” ♦
Authors: Milo Zhang, Hudson Lockett