CarBrandLogos archive · FAW · 1956
The truck that started China's motor industry, copied wholesale from a Soviet design.
Discover the storyPhoto: Jeka3000 · CC BY-SA 3.0
The story
Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the FAW Jiefang CA-10, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.
01
China had no vehicle industry to speak of when the First Automobile Works was laid out at Changchun in the early 1950s, so it borrowed one. The plant was built with Soviet assistance, and the product was a licensed copy of the ZIS-150: a conventional front-engine, rear-drive truck with a 5.6-litre straight-six and a five-speed gearbox, sturdy rather than sophisticated, and designed to be repaired by people with limited tools.
1976. Зис · Post of Soviet Union · Public domain
02
The first Jiefang — the name means liberation — came off the Changchun line in 1956, and the moment was treated as a national event. Until then every motor vehicle in China had been imported or captured. The same basic design was built in the Soviet Union by ZIS and later ZIL, in Romania as the Steagul Rosu, and in Georgia at Kutaisi; across all of those plants more than two million were produced.
ARP-2 ZIS-150 fire engine · Zinnsoldat · CC BY-SA 4.0
03
What mattered in China was longevity. FAW kept the CA-10 in production until 1986, nearly three decades, long after the Soviet original had been replaced by the ZIL-130. It hauled construction materials, grain, soldiers and everything else through the entire Mao era, and it trained the engineers, tool-makers and managers who went on to build the rest of the Chinese industry. FAW remains one of the country's largest vehicle manufacturers, and Jiefang is still the name on its trucks.
Jiefang CA10 at PRC70 Exhibition · N509FZ · CC BY-SA 4.0
At a glance
Produced
1947–1965Units built
2,056,117Engine
5.6 Technical specification
Contemporaries from the 1950s
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