China's oldest car company rolled out its first vehicle on Aug. 1, 1958; it was a chrome-lined black sedan designed -- like the pastiche of 1950s cars it resembled, including the Packard-esque Chaika -- to strike equal amounts of fear and inspiration into the revolutionaries. In Chinese, "Hongqi" in means "red flag," the most potent symbol of the Chinese Communist Party, making it a fitting name for a company that supplied the apparatchik. A symbol of power, a sphere of influence, a four-wheeled Great Leap Forward! Curiously enough, it took Nixon's 1972 visit for Mao Zedong (who finally swore off the Soviets and their ZIS-110s) to get into a Hongqi.
Today, you can ride around in your own Hongqi; in lieu of loyal service to the Party, you can provide something even more valuable: cash, and tons of it. How shamelessly bourgeois, you might say, and you'd be pretty damn right.
Today, you can ride around in your own Hongqi; in lieu of loyal service to the Party, you can provide something even more valuable: cash, and tons of it. How shamelessly bourgeois, you might say, and you'd be pretty damn right.
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