The mainland's supercharged plans to promote battery-powered and hybrid-electric cars are without doubt the most ambitious in the world. But Beijing's dreams of leading a global green-vehicle revolution have in recent months received a jolt of reality.
Last year, top policymakers rolled out an electric-car programme that can only be called grand: the government pledged to spend 100 billion yuan (HK$122 billion) to get 20 million 'green' cars on the road by 2020. The goal included 5 million cars capable of running on batteries alone some or all of the time.
To that end, officials showered benefits on consumers willing to get behind the wheel of a cutting-edge car. Since June 2010, private buyers of electric cars in selected cities have received subsidies of 60,000 yuan to 120,000 yuan per vehicle.
Beijing's thinking was that only a programme of such dramatic scope could bring change on the scale needed to improve energy independence and curb air pollution in the world's most populous nation.
The emerging nature of electric-car technology also offered the mainland a chance to get in on the ground floor and compete on equal footing against established foreign car giants in a sector most analysts expect to be central to the industry's future.
However, the road to green-car dominance has been paved with false starts and technological setbacks. Now, just one year into the mainland's groundbreaking 10-year plan, policy leaders at the highest levels appear to be mulling a major course correction.
'It remains uncertain whether hybrid and electric cars, which are now the focus of much of the development, will be the winners in the end,' Premier Wen Jiabao wrote last month in Qiushi Journal, a top Communist Party policy magazine. 'Hybrid cars have made some progress, but the technology still lags behind developed countries by a large margin.