HOW HE SEES IT Chinese take the revolutionary road in a Buick Regal

By DALE McFEATTERS
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
In postwar America, there was no more stolid symbol of middle-class respectability and upward mobility than the Buick. That image dogs the port-holed car to this day.
GM positioned the Buick so that its purchase signified that the buyer had moved up out of the common ruck of Chevys, Fords and Plymouths and was now solidly ensconced just one rung short of the top of the ladder, the Cadillac. The Buick conveyed similar financial solvency but without the ostentation. A title on the door meant a Buick in the driveway.
Those days might be over here, but not in China, where, you would think, the last car the revolutionary masses would turn to would be the Buick, the staff car, so to speak, of Western corporate jackals hoping to become capitalist hyenas.
Record sales
The Wall Street Journal reports that Chinese car buyers love the Buick and for basically the same reasons postwar Americans did. Buick sales in China are on track to exceed those in the United States -- 141,319 there compared to 162,456 here for the first six months of this year. Thanks in part to Buick, GM for the first time became the largest-selling foreign car maker in China.
According to the Journal, much of the Buick's appeal is its pre-revolution image as the preferred car of the rich and powerful, going back to the last emperor who owned two of them. In an observation that must have Buick executives in Detroit sobbing in envy at their colleagues in Shanghai, the Journal writes, "Somehow, the elite image of Buick remains frozen in time, and it's still a symbol of status and affluence for modern-day upwardly mobile Chinese."
Nothing says bourgeois like a Buick, and the Chinese car buyer would have it no other way.