{"id":200,"date":"2009-10-12T10:42:41","date_gmt":"2009-10-12T15:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.asian-nation.org\/headlines\/?p=1527"},"modified":"2009-10-12T10:42:41","modified_gmt":"2009-10-12T15:42:41","slug":"hummer-sold-to-chinese-what-will-americans-do-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/2009\/10\/12\/hummer-sold-to-chinese-what-will-americans-do-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Hummer Sold to Chinese: What Will Americans Do Now?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most people know the Hummer line of sport utility vehicles as embodying a very “in-your-face” image of conspicuous materialism and conservative<\/a>, anti-environmentalist values. Hummers have been the bane of environmentalists for a while, with many being vandalized through the years by radical environmentalists. Nonetheless Hummer owners are very defiant and a recent survey of Hummer owners confirms that in buying their Hummers, most of them made a very conscious choice that their vehicles directly reflected their morals about American individualism, “patriotism,” and consumption<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\"Hummer<\/div>\n

This social image of Hummer and their owners is what makes this most recent development so ironic — as news organizations have begun reporting, Hummer’s current owner (General Motors) has just sold the brand<\/a> to the Chinese heavy industry company Sichuan Tengzhong:<\/p>\n

\n

It marks the first time that Chinese investors have stepped in as buyers into the distressed U.S. auto industry. The sale also comes at a time when China has emerged as the world’s largest auto market and GM remains majority-owned by the U.S. government after being driven into bankruptcy. . . . A person familiar with the deal said earlier on Friday that the Hummer business would be sold for about $150 million, far less than GM’s early estimate that Hummer could fetch more than $500 million. . . .<\/p>\n

Hummer’s sales peaked in 2006 but have been hit hard since by a slumping U.S. economy, higher gasoline prices and a shift in U.S. consumer tastes away from Hummer’s heavy-duty SUVs and its military-derived styling. Through September, Hummer’s U.S. sales were down 64 percent this year. Analysts said the new Hummer faces a difficult task of revamping a macho brand associated with the excess of the past economic boom in the United States.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

From a sociological point of view, the question now becomes, what will these individualist, flag-waving, American-valuing fans of Hummer do, now that their beloved company is owned by [gasp] a Chinese company?!?<\/p>\n

Will they still embrace the brand and its macho, John Wayne-worshiping image? Will they continue to buy Hummers in the future, even though it means that their money will go to a Chinese, rather than an American, company?<\/p>\n

I don’t know the answers to these questions yet, but I will definitely enjoy sitting back and watching how these Hummer owners and fans grapple with this perplexing and ironic dilemma.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The irony is inescapable: Hummer, the cultural bastion of rugged American values and staunch patriotism, has just been sold to “the enemy” — a Chinese company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[224,488,352,1983,1984,1905],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-contexts","category-general","category-general-motors","category-hummer","category-patriotism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}