It's Easier to Build a Car from a Scratch

The North America Auto Show is on full swing in Detroit this week. The New York Times reporter Ezra Dyer went to the Cobo Center to check out the fancy metals and exotic models--the car, that is.

He was not surprised to find a few cars on display were from China. Everyone knew they were coming; after all, it's supposed to be the automobile's turn after toy, shoes, and DVD players had flooded the market. But Dyer was shocked by how Changfeng was presenting itself and the products it manufactured. He wrote a blog--yes, The New York Times blogs too--entitled Amid the Loud Bugle Calls, the Worker are Awakened.

While watching the Changfeng Motors “Image Propaganda Film,” Dyer learned that the company's pickups “have the pure blood of high brands”, that its cars equip with the "auto sofas", that its "workers are awakened amid the loud bugle calls" before they rushed to work. In the end, it concludes metophorically that “dragons are taking off and cheetahs are leaping forward.”

If your native language is Chinese, as mines is, you understand perfectly what these "propaganda" is trying to convey--sounding half sleek, half cliché in Chinese; if yours is not, well, it's sort of complicated to explain the type of the action that dragons and cheetahs take.

But it's not hard to see, for us Chinese, that to build a car from scratch is much easier; to speak a proper English, however, is really not our cup of tea.