The first products of the Tianjin Auto Repair Works.

We know the Tianjin Auto Repair Works from the Heping saloons made in 1958. People name this factory as developing the first Chinese car. For two reasons, the 1946 Feiying closed three wheel vehicle and the 1951 station wagon.

Tianjin ‘woody’ 1951, beautiful drawing (and copyright) by Ivan Kolev.

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Jeeps made before the production of the BJ212.

Chairman Mao inspecting the Red Guards in a Beijing BJ212 cross country vehicle.

The most important Chinese cross-country vehicle is the Beijing BJ212. Developed in the early 1960s, in production since 1965. Yes, still in production!! The introduction was during the mass-movement Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, chairman Mao using it to inspect the Red guards.

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Minicars from Shanghai.

Haiyan CK730 taxi in Shanghai Traffic.

Not only Beijing made minicars in the late 1950s (see our entry “Minicars made by the Qinghua University in Beijing.“), also Shanghai did an effort to replace the pedicab and the rickshaw by small motorized vehicles. There was one big difference: in Beijing it was the Qinghua University which was behind all these efforts, in Shanghai it were several small workshops. It is possible that some factories were differently named in press releases, and that these products were in fact from the same manufacturer. But that is difficult to find out after 60 years. Here we give you the factory names as found in books and newspapers.

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Minicars made by the Qinghua University in Beijing.

Several mini-cars made by the Qinghua University.

Not content with the physical labour people offered to transport others: the rickshaw and the pedicab, the Chinese authorities stimulated in the 1950s the development of minicars, to be used as taxicabs. The Automobile and Tractor Department of the Qinghua (Tsinghua) University in Beijing developed in the years 1958-61 a whole series of them, I counted 5 different models with 11 different versions which I will introduce here. Qinghua worked together with the Beijing Second Repair Works.

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