China’s ‘Motown’ has charms of its own

The first thing you need to know about the Chinese city of Wuhu is how to pronounce its name: it’s not an ebullient Woohoo! exclamation but more a strangled gasp – as if a woman with long pointy nails has goosed you on a tender part of your anatomy.

Though Wuhu is not the capital city of Anhui province – that’s Hefei – it is effectively the largest.

Two generations of industrialisation, urbanisation and urban sprawl has seen a conurbation of cities to create a megapolis with a total population of 10.6 million peoples.

The population of Wuhu itself is just under four million people. I know this might be boring but bear with me a moment: things begin to get interesting soon.

Anhui was an agricultural backwater until the late 1990s. Now the province is booming and its nominal per capita gross domestic product (GDP) ranks 14th in China.

Wuhu has the second strongest economy in Anhui after Hefei and its per capita GDP has more than doubled in the past 12 years.

Residents’ annual per capita disposable income grew 6.5% between 2021 and 2022.

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Chinese automotive industry

Much of that growth coincides with the Wuhu municipal government’s decision in 1997 to establish the Chery Automobile Company.

Chinese government participation in motor manufacturing was nothing new: most vehicle-building companies in the country have greater or lesser degrees of state investment and control.

In just 27 years, Chery has built more than 15 million vehicles, including 1.75 million in the first nine months of this year, which helped see Chery debut on the Fortune Global 500 list in August 2024 with revenues of R720 billion.

The company exports 47% of its vehicles. Earlier this year, the Wuhu government decided to diversify.

It withdrew the bulk of its investment from Chery – the company is now predominantly privately owned – and put its financial muscle behind a fledgling shipbuilding sector.

Yes, Chery is involved. Wuhu’s economic boom is evident by the skyscrapers that dominate the skyline, mainly along the banks of the Yangtze River, the main route for transporting cars, iron, copper, coal, and electronic goods to Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Over-population

This has come at a price, however, and the river has become badly polluted over the past few years.

Many of the skyscrapers are apartment blocks and there is constant construction of high-rise residential accommodation; with a metro population density of 1 400 people per square kilometre, the only way to house them all is by building upwards.

Many office-blocks are transformed into bright billboards at night. The Chinese penchant for vibrant colour was also demonstrated during an evening boozecruise, the literal highlight of which was the spotlit Wuhu Yangtze River Bridge.

Things that seem so ordinary to us, like access to the internet and social media, are strictly prohibited.

Tourists wanting to communicate with their loved ones at home via WhatsApp or similar channels are urged to install virtual private networks (VPNs) on their cellphones and laptops before travelling in order to hoodwink the netcensors.

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Navigating the cultural contrasts

Freedom of movement is restricted in the sense that foreigners can’t hire cars but have to rely on taxis or public transport.

This presents its own problems because most Chinese people have an extremely rudimentary knowledge of English.

This gives rise to the incomprehensible “Chinglish” that baffles the Western brain. One piece of graffiti I saw in one of the older sections of Wuhu that left me scratching my head was “No money, no cat”.

I didn’t want to ask, especially since the Hilton Hotel in which I was staying had a big bowl of spicy fried bullfrog one night on the buffet.

(The hotel was packed with foreign delegates to Chery’s International User Summit, among them some 120 Russians, and broiled amphibians were ringing no-one’s gastronomic bells. Our South African group kept bumping into them at McDonalds and Burger King in one of the elegant but largely deserted local malls.)

I went walkabout on a couple of occasions and made some lovely discoveries.

Just behind the hotel was a pavilion and stone tower that date back, apparently, to the Ming Dynasty.

I wouldn’t swear to it, though, because the plaque detailing their history was in Chinglish.

Not far away is a very modern building, possibly an office-block, that was strangely attractive given that it looked remarkably like a glass fish.

Not a tourist city but Wuhu’s growing fast China’s ‘Motown’ has charms of its own My best perambulation was through one of the old sections of the city in search of the Catholic Cathedral of St Joseph.

This was quite daunting as it involved crossing one of Wuhu’s busiest streets with cars and the ubiquitous electric scooters coming at me from all directions… from the wrong way, too.

I made it unscathed and found myself in a delightful little world that initially appeared quite seedy but had more character than anything else I’d seen in the city, including (or especially) the garish Fantawild Adventure theme park.

It might have been a maze of alleys but they were spotlessly clean. The place was a hive of small businesses most of which involved repairing scooters, making clothes, selling booze, and preparing street food (I didn’t try any).

Most fascinating were the stalls where the owners were binding live crabs with reeds… crabs apparently being a great seasonal delicacy… to prevent them scuttling off before they could be sold and cooked.

I was greeted everywhere with guarded warmth and no-one objected to me taking pictures.

It was a very colourful little world but I couldn’t help thinking that if I returned in two years’ time, this haven of good-natured life where few of the buildings were higher than four floors, will have been demolished and replaced with impressive but soulless 30-storey apartment blocks.

As for the Cathedral, it is still in use after having been built, destroyed, rebuilt, burned down during the Cultural Revolution and finally restored in 1983.

It was a weekday and few people were there other than two teenage lovers doing some serious snogging in the front pew.

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