Insane Mode by Hamish McKenzie

Author:Hamish McKenzie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

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On my last night in Beijing, I met two friends for dinner at a roast duck restaurant in the Parkview Green mall, an enormous glass-walled pyramid in Beijing’s central business district. As well as being notable for its environmentally friendly credentials, the mall was the site of Tesla’s first store in China. It had opened in November 2013.

After picking through Peking duck at our patio table on the warm spring night, I decided to go see the Tesla store. One of my dinner companions came with me and we walked along a darkened hallway past shuttered luxury retailers—Van Cleef & Arpels, Alfie’s Beijing, a high-end sushi restaurant—before coming upon the store, which was lit up like a beacon. It stretched most of the length of the mall’s southern wall.

“You can’t go in there; it’s closed,” a security guard told us as we approached.

“It’s okay, we just want to take a look from the outside,” my friend said.

It was three days after the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, a social upheaval that had inflicted trauma on the rich and conspicuously educated. The People’s Daily, a government mouthpiece, marked the occasion by calling the Cultural Revolution “a mistake . . . that cannot and will not be allowed to repeat itself.”

China had learned its lesson from that decade of tumult, the paper continued, and was determined to avoid any social unrest that would disrupt progress. “The Chinese people have never been so close to realizing the goal of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

From the dim corridor, we peered into the lighted room and saw two Model S’s parked on an epoxy floor, surrounded by an array of branded T-shirts and white logos. We lingered for a few moments, just the two of us and a perplexed security guard, looking in a window to an empty store. This was new China: savvy, capitalist, and hopeful. Tesla’s presence was still that of a leader from a foreign land, but its biggest challenges could soon come from within the country.

For the time being, my friend and I looked in at the preeminent symbols for a future of clean transportation and wondered what story would be told of them in the decades to come. The cars—vehicles for a new revolution—looked proud but lonely.

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