TAYLOR: The 20 million strong city of Shanghai showcases China’s economic boom. This city of entrepreneurs has embraced the car culture with gusto. At first, the statistics don’t seem so daunting – a nation of one point three billion people but only fourteen million cars – but by 2010 there’ll be fifty five million cars, trucks and buses on the roads. Auto makers are overjoyed.

KEVIN WALE: [General Motors] It starts in the bigger cities but we keep forgetting how many big cities there are in China. You know there’s probably over a hundred cities with more than a million people.

TAYLOR: To own a car in China is to enjoy the good life. Car ads like this one have real power.

LO SZE PING: [Greenpeace] I think we need to debunk the American dream of having a car equals to personal freedom. With China having one fifth of the world’s population, this just isn’t an imaginable road to go ahead.

TAYLOR: Environmental activist Lo Sze Ping says China’s environment is already under severe stress. It has sixteen of the world’s twenty worst polluted cities. Cars are responsible for much of the choking air.

So is China repeating the mistakes that everybody else in the world has made?

LO SZE PING: I mean it’s like we know very clearly by driving a car, you are driving human civilisation, going over the cliff. Everyone knows that but we still do it.

TAYLOR: Not that long ago bicycles ruled the roads of China. In the 60s and 70s, people would save for years to buy a bicycle. Millions of people were on the move and the air was still fresh and clean. It’s a very different picture today.

The rise of the car has mirrored China’s explosion as the world’s fastest growing major economy. Today car ownership is a dream within growing reach of millions of Chinese. It’s almost impossible to understand but if ownership rates here ever equal that of Australia or America, there’ll be enough cars to fill a seven lane highway to the moon.

Twenty five year old Beijinger Wei Li, is a proud first time car owner. The university graduate works for a foreign technology company and enjoys an improving middle class lifestyle.

WEI LI: I bought my car in May, 2005. I wanted to buy one right after I graduated, but I couldn’t afford it. I worked very hard, even during 3 years at university, to earn enough money.

TAYLOR: Wei Li and her husband are family pioneers, the first to own a car. It’s meant a lot of their savings and a sizable part of their salaries but in this status conscious country, a car shows you’ve made it.

WEI LI: In the past I might have felt jealous about other people driving cars. Now I feel that they envy me.

TAYLOR: The narrow roads in the head of old Beijing weren’t designed for the car but the old has to accommodate the new. Today Wei Li is visiting her parents-in-law. They’re proud of her achievement but also worried about the new phenomenon of road rage.

LIU MINGSU: You should pay more attention to road safety.

WEI LI: I’ll drive slowly.

LIU MINGSU: Right. You shouldn’t chase after anybody.

WEI LI: But my temper is not very good. And I’m very competitive.

TAYLOR: These are the people driving the market. About five million a year are graduating from driving schools. After learning the road rules, students at this school spend thirty hours just manoeuvring back and forth, but it doesn’t dampen learners’ enthusiasm.

STUDENT AT DRIVING SCHOOL: Because my income is now high enough, I want to buy a car. That’s why I want to learn to drive.

TAYLOR: Students also practice on packed purpose built roads where the cars never hit top gear. It’s only after they get their licence that they experience real driving conditions. It helps explain why new drivers are commonly called “road killers”.

Getting behind the wheel in China is an experience like no other. Chinese Australian lawyer Jason Li works for China’s new road service.

JASON LI: [China Automobile Association] According to the Chinese culture, you can mortally offend somebody’s pride if you put on a seatbelt whilst their driving. If you do that for a lot of Chinese drivers, it’s a sign that you don’t trust them. It’s a sign that you think that they’re a bad driver.

TAYLOR: China’s roads are among the deadliest in the world. It’s estimated that more than one hundred thousand people die in accidents every year – with many more being injured.

ANDREW HARDING: [China Automobile Association] Look it’s a frightening statistic. Really if you equate it to a simple metaphor, it’s roughly a jumbo jet crashing every day.

TAYLOR: Andrew Harding runs the China Automobile Association. It’s actually an Australian owned operation that provides roadside service and driver education. As a nation of first time drivers, China has much to learn.

ANDREW HARDING: We find that we have a much higher break down rate and a much higher sort of frequency of break down here then we have elsewhere and it’s purely just people not knowing. A lot of it is also just people not understanding how their car works.

TAYLOR: The Chinese just don’t own more cars, they’re making them. Within two decades China is tipped to produce more cars than anywhere else in the world. This GM production line in Shanghai is making variations of its popular Buick Excelle.

KEVIN WALE: This is a great time to be here. We’d like to be here by ourselves but unfortunately everyone wants to compete.

TAYLOR: General Motors currently holds poll position in Chinese manufacturing but more than one hundred different local and foreign companies are building cars in China. Foreign companies can only enter China if they have a Chinese partner.

MICHAEL DUNNE: [Auto Resources Asia] In what other market in the world could someone get away with that? None. China, the ultimate negotiators. They’re able to say you need our market so badly that this is the arrangement. You can come in, you can bring your money and your capital but oh by the way you can only own up to 50% and in the same city my other partner will be your competitor. Deal?

[Walking along street] Beijing’s got to rate in the top three, if not number one today in terms of traffic.

TAYLOR: Michael Dunne is a car industry analyst from Detroit who’s made China home. Despite the cooperation now, he says everyone’s gearing up for a battle in the future.

MICHAEL DUNNE: On the one hand the foreign automaker implicitly understands, believes that one day he will take over his Chinese partner, and on the other hand the Chinese company looks across a table at its foreign partner and says one day I will have yours and you may or may not be here in China anymore.

TAYLOR: More cars also need more fuel and China is already struggling to meet its surging energy needs. Some are predicting that within a few years, cars, trucks and buses will account for 60% of China’s oil bill.

By 2020 it’s thought China will consume nearly nine million barrels of oil a day. That means more pollution. China’s thirst is one of the key reasons why world oil prices are at extraordinary heights.

Far from trying to restrict the car boom, the government’s response has been to build millions of kilometres of new roads. In cities, it means people’s homes inevitably go. It’s one side of the car boom that people don’t usually see.

[People at protest] In the coastal city of Tianjin, these people are fighting not to be run over by the advance of the car. The local government wants to destroy their inner city homes to make way for wider roads and a new development. Hundreds of families have already been moved out.

[Footage of forcible eviction – man yelling] I don’t want to leave!

TAYLOR: But their compensation has been paltry.

Protests over forcible evictions are commonplace in China now and a source of mounting concern for the ruling Communist Party but the poor invariably lose. This was Ning Kemin earlier this year, struggling for a fair price for her home. She and her husband were unemployed and determined to be treated fairly.

NING KEMIN: It’s good to improve people’s living standards, but they don’t do that. They just want to make money for themselves by trampling the ordinary people under their feet – to succeed by sacrificing the interests of ordinary people.

TAYLOR: But the Chinese Government won. A last desperate protest captured here by a mobile phone was unsuccessful. Ning Kemin and her husband were forcibly evicted.

NING KEMIN: [Crying] They are so cruel! Such a nice family has now been destroyed by them. They’re such bullies.

TAYLOR: Yet for first time car owner Wei Li, her car means nothing but freedom and opportunity. Wei Li has even joined a car club that’s opened up a new social network.

WEI LI: I think it’s good for us to get together. I’m very happy. I also have many good friends and can meet lots of people. They might help me with my work.

TAYLOR: The car is allowing Chinese to go places they’ve never been. The club is visiting an orphanage on the outskirts of Beijing caring for abandoned sick children. The greater freedom offered by the car, also gives them a greater insight into the hardships endured by many people.

Do you think though that perhaps driving a car is some of the freest expression that people have in China?

JASON LI: And that is part of the attraction. That is, that is partly why cars have taken China by storm because it is a symbol of freedom. It is a symbol of economic development. It is a symbol of having made it and being able to enjoy that freedom.

TAYLOR: The rise of the car is a dream realised for millions of Chinese, yet it poses a huge challenge to the world’s environment – energy supplies and it promises to reshape the global auto industry – but the car is muscling its way through China and it seems nothing can get in its path.