Recruiting in China

China’s car makers are increasingly ambitious, as illustrated by plans to grow at home and, in some cases, expand abroad. One big impediment they face in taking on their foreign rivals: design.

Big global companies spend years, and millions of dollars, designing new cars. But many home-grown Chinese auto makers actually do very little of that.

A senior executive of one small auto maker in Hebei recently laid it out for us over a cup of tea: the reason his company can sell cars much cheaper than foreign auto makers who also produce cars in China, he said, is that his company does no engineering or design work whatsoever. Instead, they tell an outside engineering consultant which existing model they want to copy, and ask them to come up with a product counterfeited in a way that it won’t attract intellectual property lawsuits. In some cases that means companies combining styling ideas from two separate cars into one.

The problem isn’t a lack of talent — as China Journal found one recent day on a visit to the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. There we met Phoenix Wang and Jackie Lin, two students whose edgy car designs have put them near the top of their class. Both Wang, a 22 year old from Sichuan, and Lin, a 23 year old from Guangdong, have long been determined to pursue car design professionally. But they and their peers have dim prospects in a domestic industry that doesn’t value their skills.

Their instructor is trying to change that. Ed Wong is a former General Motors Corp. designer who over the past five years also has worked off and on as an outside design consultant for Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Corp., helping the company come up with uniquely-designed and –styled cars of its own, which it aims to launch over the next few years. Wong — a 1987 graduate of the Art Center College of Design, the Harvard of car design, in Pasadena, Calif. — went to work at GM’s main design studio near Detroit before becoming a car-design instructor in the mid-90s, teaching car design in California and Hong Kong.

Since arriving in Beijing, he has designed, among other cars, the Beijing Warrior, the rugged vehicle China’s army now uses as its main jeep, and the Beijing 800 sedan and several other concept cars Beijing Auto showed at the Beijing auto show in 2008.

Wong joined the Central Academy of Fine Arts last September as director of the school’s transportation design department, and he is helping change the outlook of students like Wang and Lin.

Wang says she was planning to continue her design studies in the U.S., but Wong brought with him a car-styling curriculum similar to that used at Art Center, and now she no longer feels she needs to go abroad to pursue her dream. Initially an industrial design student learning to design cell phones and bicycles, Lin says Wong “changed my life and outlook.”

Wang and Lin have it better than many of their fellow aspiring car designers. They plan, for now, to work with Wong after graduation, consulting for Beijing Auto. But until Chinese auto makers start taking design more seriously, theirs will remain a challenging job market, and a lot of talent will go to waste.