Changchun
Japan built the infrastructure, the Soviets chose the site, and China built its first car here in 1958. Changchun's auto industry is a coral reef of colonial succession—each layer built on the skeleton of the last.
China's first domestically built car—the Hongqi limousine—rolled off a Changchun assembly line in 1958. The factory that built it, First Automotive Works (FAW), still dominates the city. But Changchun's industrial DNA was written by three foreign powers before China ever turned the ignition.
The city grew at the junction of the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway and the Russian-owned Chinese Eastern Railway—two imperial projects that collided in northeast China. In 1932, Japan renamed the city Xinjing ('New Capital') and made it the seat of Manchukuo, its puppet state in Manchuria. For thirteen years, Japanese urban planners built ministries, boulevards, and rail infrastructure for a colonial capital designed to project imperial authority. The Badabu complex—eight Manchukuo ministry buildings blending Chinese, Japanese, and Western architecture—still stands. When Manchukuo collapsed in 1945, the infrastructure remained. The Soviet Union, eyeing a location near its border with surviving industrial capacity, chose Changchun for China's first automobile factory in 1953. FAW broke ground with Soviet technical assistance, producing the Jiefang CA-10 truck in 1956—a copy of the Soviet ZIS-150. Each layer of occupation constructed the niche for the next, the way coral polyps build on the calcium carbonate skeletons of their predecessors.
FAW now operates joint ventures with Volkswagen, Toyota, and Audi from Changchun, producing passenger cars, trucks, and luxury vehicles. The city manufactures roughly 9% of China's automobiles—a founder effect from a 1953 factory location chosen for geopolitical convenience, not market logic. Beyond auto, Changchun anchors biopharmaceuticals, optoelectronics, and China's state film industry (Changchun Film Studio, founded 1945, produced the first feature film of the People's Republic).
Changchun's GDP exceeds 700 billion yuan, modest for a city of 9 million. The path dependence cuts both ways: the same industrial monoculture that made Changchun China's Detroit now constrains diversification as the auto industry shifts to electric vehicles manufactured in southern China. FAW's 2024 pivot to EVs and autonomous driving is Changchun's bet that succession need not mean replacement—that the reef can grow a new layer without the old one crumbling.