Wuhu
A declining Yangtze textile city that created China's top car exporter from scratch — eight engineers in a brick factory, a used Ford production line, and municipal government as founder.
China's top car exporter was born in a dilapidated brick factory. Chery Automobile — which has led Chinese-brand passenger vehicle exports for most years since 2003 — was not attracted to Wuhu through tax breaks or infrastructure. Wuhu's municipal government invented it from scratch, with no automotive expertise, no supply chain, and an initial investment of 300,000 yuan.
Wuhu sits on the southeast bank of the Yangtze in Anhui province, historically a commercial hub for rice, silk, and tea. By the early 1990s, the textile industry that sustained the city was faltering. The response was not recruitment but creation. In 1997, the municipal government incorporated what would become Chery Automobile, recruited Yin Tongyue — a Wuhu native working at First Automotive Works — and bought a secondhand Ford engine production line for approximately $30 million. Eight engineers known as the "Eight Immortals" started building cars in a converted brick factory.
Wuhu did not wait for an automaker to arrive — it constructed one, the way weaver ants bind leaves into living architecture using their own larvae as silk-spinning tools. The municipality used its own government apparatus as the binding material for a new industrial organism, engineering an economic niche where none existed. The Eight Immortals who founded Chery imposed a founder effect that still shapes the company's DNA: state-owned, export-driven, and vertically integrated.
The first Chery rolled off the line on 18 December 1999, but the company had no production licence. Wuhu engineered a partnership with SAIC Group in 2001, securing the legal framework to sell cars. The Chery Fengyun sold 28,000 units in its first year on the market, generating approximately ¥2 billion in revenue. Chery exports to more than 100 countries.
The co-evolution between city and company runs deep. Chery remains majority-owned by Wuhu's State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, and the company's expansion reshaped the city's identity — from a rice-trading riverport to an automotive hub whose streets, university programmes, and supplier parks are organized around vehicle manufacturing. Wuhu is Anhui's second-largest economy, with a GDP exceeding ¥500 billion and a population of 3.6 million. The city that built its own automaker has been rebuilt by it in return.