Xi whiz: Inside Xi Jinping’s million-dollar Hongqi

Fancy a spin as China’s supreme leader? Try this million-dollar Hongqi.

Hongqi L5

When Britain was moaning about a recent warm spell, I was in the Chinese city of Chongqing, where it was a fairly toasty 48°C. And that’s without the humidity, which causes the air to feel heavy. Being outside was like being under a hot dead horse.

Chinese people will tell you that Chongqing is the furnace of China. Everyone else, meanwhile, will say, “Chong-what?” And that’s odd, because the city’s metropolitan area is home to more than 30 million people. You don’t feel like a person there. You feel like a molecule.

I loved Chongqing. I loved the local delicacy, “hot pot” – it’s goose intestines, or congealed duck’s blood, or cow tendon, cooked at the table in a cauldron of dynamite and napalm. This causes you to sweat profusely, which means that when you leave the air-conditioned restaurant and climb back under the dead horse, you’re coated in a cooling layer of perspiration. Clever.

Then I left on the bullet train, which is capable of 500km/h. When I first visited China, the train I took from Beijing to Xian was pulled by a steam locomotive, and the lavatory car was a wooden box with a hole in the floor. All the other passengers had missed it, some by several feet. And that was only 30 years ago.

Before 1988 there wasn’t a single motorway in the country. Now the Chinese have 130,000km of them, and recently they’ve been adding at least 10,000km a year. They’re the smoothest, freest-flowing roads in the world. The only drawback is that every hundred metres every car is photographed and every picture is analysed to make sure the driver is not on the phone or speeding or “touching his passenger. Or himself”.

Thirty years ago Chinese people were not allowed to drive a car. Now they’re buying 24 million a year. To try to force locals to buy cars made in China, vehicles manufactured in Europe cost twice as much as in the West. But that’s not stopping the new rich. You see Rolls-Royces, Ferraris and Bentleys constantly.

This, however, is not much use to President Xi Jinping, because he can’t turn up to a global conference in a Bentley. That’d be admitting to the world that China’s car industry is no good. Nor can he turn up in a Haval or a Trumpchi, because then everyone would know for sure that the Chinese car industry is no good. He needs something that causes the world to say: “Wow.” Which is why Xi uses a Hongqi L5.

It costs $1 million (you read that correctly) and it looks like a Chrysler 300C, which is how all cars look when the designer is told to make something that looks like a Bentley. Except, to set it apart, it also has hints of the Peugeot 404 and the Austin 1100. None of which you notice, because of the red flag bonnet ornament. That’s what Hongqi means: red flag. This, then, is a million-dollar communist symbol.

Getting hold of one to try was nigh-on impossible. They’re made only for top officials and priced to make sure no one else buys one. But eventually, using enormous amounts of cold, hard cash, I was able to borrow one for a day. It was delivered by a one-legged man in a vest who spoke no English and knew nothing about what the car was. But we were able to work out that it’s powered by a homemade V12 engine that produces 300kW. About what you got from a big Mercedes in the 1990s.

This would be fine, except the Hongqi – a hard word to say on TV, by the way – weighs 2.8 tonnes, which means it’s a bit slow. Which is a good thing, because it has no airbags. It also has no cupholders. There is electrical adjustment for the steering wheel, but that was broken. And I didn’t mind, because, ooh, it was a nice place to sit. It wasn’t remotely comfortable: the seats were rock-hard, and the suspension had, I think, been made from the offcuts of whatever they’d used to create the doors, but, boy, does this thing have presence. Nothing I’ve driven says “pay attention to what I have to say” more than this. You roll up in one to a meeting and you’re going to get your way. It is the meanest, baddest-looking son of a bitch the world has seen.

And who cares if it’s slow? It’s only made for driving in a stately manner past adoring crowds, then getting out of. Theresa May has a Jaguar. Angela Merkel has a Mercedes. Emmanuel Macron has to get out of the back of a Renault Clio. And all of them will look feeble when Xi steps out of his Hongqi. It’s a symbol that China will take over the world. Which it will.