Cars That Ate China, The (ATOM Study Guide)

The Cars That Ate China is a portrait of a society gone car crazy as China becomes the biggest car market on earth. The film is first and foremost a story about people – a quarter of humanity – aspiring to have what we all want.

Stefan Moore, the film's director says:
I wanted to create a portrait of a people caught up in an extraordinary time in history. Although this film is about the Chinese experience, it is also a parable about modernity and consumerism that attempts to look at what's at stake for all of us. Following a diverse group of people whose lives have been affected by cars, the film is a poignant, droll and surprising journey into a world that has profound repercussions for our own.

With the Summer Olympics taking place in Beijing, China's capital, in August, 2008, the eyes of the world will be on China, watching more than the world's greatest international sporting event. Television cameras and reporters will record and broadcast as much about life in China as possible – and as is allowed by the Chinese authorities. The spotlight will be on China's astonishing transformation and development, but what is behind the towering apartment blocks and expressways?

China is in the midst of an automotive revolution that has not been witnessed since the halcyon days of Henry Ford. Cars are now the ultimate symbol of status and prosperity in a country that is well on its way to becoming the biggest economy in the world. But car culture is also bringing about volatile class divisions, the world's worst air pollution, and fierce global competition for limited resources. And it's only just begun.

China is already the second largest auto market in the world and will soon be the biggest, and automakers from around the world are in a feeding frenzy for a piece of the action. Today, car culture is everywhere – in television ads, glossy magazines, glitzy showrooms and international auto shows with scantily clad models. For China's rising middle class, the new prosperity symbolised by the car is intoxicating. For the future of Chinese society, the environment and the world, some of the prospects are chilling.

The story of The Cars That Ate China is told through a diverse group of characters whose lives have been transformed by the car revolution. We meet a group of well-off kids who race their modified cars around Beijing's highways in the middle of the night, a newly-rich small businessman who drives his first new car back to his rural village to proudly show his 75-year-old father, an American ad man who creates television commercials to sell cars as status symbols to Chinese men, a migrant family that has come to Beijing to start a car wash business, a millionaire real estate developer who drives a Bentley, a young activist attempting to prevent Beijing's historic neighbourhoods from being destroyed by road construction and high rises, an English writer and Beijing resident who foresees environmental Armageddon, and a female worker who says she is a small screw in the big car called China. Their stories reflect the hopes, fears, conflicts and contradictions of a society caught up in a whirlwind of unprecedented change. The film is set in Beijing, once called the 'Bicycle Kingdom' and now the epicentre of China's exploding car culture.