Buckin' Bronco -- breaking in my JH600 in rural Sichuan

[euphonius]

All:

It's hard to believe that in less than six months, I've gone from having never ridden a motorcycle to owning two of them. The first was a dusty, 9-year-old KLR650, purchased on my birthday in December 2009 as a balm after 6 or 7 years of suffering and deferred gratification while building a small publishing company in China. Between December and March I clocked about 5000km on the KLR, which was not bad for a nervous neophyte.



All that riding, and the freedom and joy I felt, gave me confidence to incorporate a bike into my life in China, where I arrived exactly 20 years ago last Monday, 17 May.

The bike I selected, after reading reports from Franki, Pfaelzer and others, was the Jialing JH600, China's only "modern" big-bore bike. The Changjiang 750 has its first-look appeal of course -- brutal, sexy and rare -- but thrives in a time warp circa maybe 1941. It's not a bike I'd want to rely on for long multiday or multiweek circuits through rural China. Franki, ChinaV and others are out in the wild right now, testing the reliability and versatility of the Galaxy XTR250 for extended touring. But for me (and surely many others) the challenge was to find a durable, powerful dual sport that would reliably stand up to all that China can dish out.

There are really only two choices: A BMW Gelaende Strasse (G650GS or F800GS) at between double and triple what it would cost in Europe or America, and the Jialing, at RMB 30,000 before registration (about US$4400 or about one-quarter or one-fifth the price of a new BMW). While some in this forum are still sitting on the fence, Franki, Pfaelzer, Bob S, TexasAggie and others have voted with their pocketbooks, and now so have I. I ordered the Jialing a month ago.

Though Jialing has dealers all over southwest China and in major cities, those shops have little or no knowledge of the JH600, which is available only from the factory. Nor is the JH600 mass produced. If they receive 10 orders before the monthly cutoff on or about the 10th, they make 10 bikes that month. You pay in full up front. If your wire transfer misses the cut, you wait another 4 weeks. My payment was processed in April, but production and delivery were delayed by the May Day holiday. I finally got the call on 11 May, and booked my flight to Chongqing for 13 May. The idea was to tame this steed on the back roads of Sichuan province, knowing I could bring it easily back to the Jialing factory in case of any problems.

So anxious was I to reach Chongqing, I took the maglev out to Pudong International Airport. In recent years the maglev has been running at just over 330 kph, perhaps to save on magnetic attraction, but with the Shanghai Expo in full force the maglev is running at full tilt 431 kilometers an hour, or 268 mph, so it takes 7 minutes from the Longyang Lu terminal rather than 10. As you can see...



...plenty of time to catch my 11:35 a.m. flight.

There's already a lot of authoritative information in this forum about the JH600, making MCM a really important supplement to the Jialing website, which is limited to a four-page English overview starting here. So my aim with this post is to give some idea about my experience at Jialing and in the saddle.

My professional calling is that of a newsman. I came to China exactly 20 years ago as a reporter for an American news agency, United Press International, then spent 10 years with a British agency, Reuters. Seven years ago I put my hand to independent publishing, starting what became a family of newsmagazines for doctors. Highly specialized but also accessible and tailored to readers' needs and ambitions. I have a reputation as a publisher who helps Chinese doctors attain training and experience (mainly in India) that is valuable for advancing their often-miserable careers. So when I called a doctor friend in Chongqing to say I was coming up to visit, and would be picking up a motorcycle as well, he assumed the latter part was a joke.



He was waiting at the airport, and I asked him to drive me to the Jialing plant at Shuangbei, on the banks of the Jialing river.

The Jialing sales office is in a bustling, leafy street on the edge of the vast Jialing campus, which is said to produce 3 million motorbikes a year and accommodate 100,000 or more workers and their families. A vast state-owned enterprise that is trying to adapt to China's own economic advances and the imperatives of globalization. Though the smaller bikes are exported in large numbers, the JH600 remains the exception. The main customers are the Peoples Liberation Army and thousands of local police departments. I'd wanted to take a tour of the factory during this visit, but given that we arrived at 4 p.m. and that I had a confused doctor in tow, we had little choice but to work through the formalities and get me on my way. I did ask about JH600 production numbers, but was told this was confidential. I had a feeling the sensitivity of this data reflected embarrassment about the low figure rather than some other trade considerations. OK, but one guy told me there are probably 500 JH600s in "civilian" hands in China, and the bike was launched in about 2007, so do the math. They are averaging fewer than 100 a year, or maybe 8-12 a month, of the civilian model.

Including mine. And then a guy walked in with the keys and said my bike was downstairs.




I managed to get sales accountant Wei Hong and sales manager Li Shilin to pose for a picture...



...then suited up for the ride to the hotel. (Apologies for getting the settings wrong.)



My adventure had begun.