Building Cars

Building Cars (also known as Building Cars, Starting in 1986) is a long urban-life web novel by Rong Zhizi. It was serialized on Qidian.com starting in November 2016 and completed in June 2020, running to 683 chapters and about 2.35 million characters; it won an Excellence Award in the second Realistic Themes in Original Online Literature contest. The story begins in the midsummer of 1993 in Hushan County, Zhehai Province, where the motorcycle industry is booming and the "Hushan Motorcycle God" races are in full swing. The protagonist, Han Hao, comes from a family that runs a private parts factory; when his father falls into a coma after a car accident, he is forced to step forward and manage the family workshop. Starting out by modifying motorcycles and entering races, he holds fast to the conviction "I want to build cars" and works his way up from parts production to complete-vehicle manufacturing: he begins by reverse-engineering the GS125 engine, then develops CVT clutch technology, and seizes a window of policy relaxation to push into the automobile industry. From there he takes the path of emulating and drawing on foreign models, entering the passenger-car segment by way of microvans, gradually closing technological gaps and building a research and development system, and weathering the shocks of international acquisitions, new energy, and internet technology as he strives to make his own brand one of the world's leading automakers. Set against real industrial developments such as the Hushan motorcycle industry cluster and an A-share listing, the work weaves in technical details such as ISO9001 certification and CKD assembly, making it one of the more substantive examples of industrial-themed web fiction. The book is about industry and about management, and also about the protagonist's choices among family, love, and the world of business.