Hummer for sale: China the Buyer?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Wait til Lou Dobbs hears about this!!

Less than 20 years after the Tiananmen massacre in Beijing, the Hummer is going Chinese.

Today, it appears that a now-officially bankrupt General Motors is going to sell the flag-waving Hummer brand to a fairly obscure manufacturer of heavy equipment and road construction machinery based in Western China. The Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company Ltd. is  privately-held and based in Chengdu, far from the power centers of Beijing and Shanghai, and seems to want to build a presence in the heavy-truck market.

On some levels this deal should not be so shocking.

America is in hock and China is flush with cash — including lots of US Treasury bills it has to recycle.

It shouldn’t be a huge surprise that the Chinese are very eager to turn their paper profits into hard American assets — especially American icons of brawn and toughness like…The Hummer? Yet the iconographic place of the Hummer in the world of American excess means folks will shake their heads and mutter about the End of the Empire if the Hummer falls into Chinese hands.

Before he turned “green,” Arnold Schwarzenegger drove a Hummer. Hummers were the Army vehicles for drivers who wanted to intimidate colleagues on the road. And the last time I visited Urumqui, in western China, a couple of Hummer models were conspicously parked in the front of the swank new  Sheraton Hotel, where it drew gasps of admiration from aspiring, middle class Chinese who’d never seen a passenger car so big and brawny.

But, alas,the world might be a better place if no one bought the brand. Repotting the Hummer in Chinese soil  won’t help Beijing address the greenhouse gas challenges that now confront the world…

GM Said to Have Agreement With Sichuan Tengzhong on Hummer Sale -

So while the economic logic makes sense — there will be a political stench around the deal. The Chinese government in Beijing will have to approve the investment, and so, likely, will be the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States, an inter-agency committee run by the Treasury.

And the folks at the Lou Dobbs show will have yet another field day as they get to moan further about the collapse of America and the evils of foreign trade.