After 20 years for Shanghai to use bidding for car license, Beijing is introducing a lottery based license plate system. You have to submit application, and try your luck. For the first week, the odd is 1 out of 12. With more and more people joining and the previous participants still in the pool, the chance gets fewer and fewer. If I can vote, I would definitely vote against it.
Just watched the 10:30 CCTV-2 program by Rui Cheng Gang 芮成钢, another YLFer focusing on Gabby. He interviewed John Holden, the previous chairman of National Committee of US-China Relationship, and one of the founder of YLF program, and shared his own experience with Gabby and Mark. (YLF was held in Huangshan in 2003, and Gabby’s home state Arizona in Sedona in 2004).
If you win the lucky draw, do you have to have a car? Could you sell the plate? What if you win the draw, buy a car, then sell the car? Does the plate go with the car? It seems like many people would want to enter the lucky draw just for the possibility of selling the plate.
Which could then mean, the luck is really “are you lucky to have guanxi with the issuing authorities”.
I like Shanghai’s system better. More straightforward.
I found the answer
Lottery winners may not transfer their registration rights to others.
“The ban on transferring registration opportunities will effectively deter speculation, in which scalpers sell them for high prices,” independent analyst Jia Xinguang told China Daily.
http://www.busiunion.com/11-1//8953.jsp
Further proof that Shanghai is more capitalist than Beijing.
Great answer, english blog,english comment :)
Without getting… well, political, I’ll have to say here that there is increasing disillusionment amongst “those who run our city” (Beijing).
We will have our “rail revenge”, though, when we get 660 km of Subway by 2015… this should get all of us underground. Provided we stick by low Subway fares, people will start wondering why the (whatever-you’d-like-to-call-it) they would own a car when they could get from A to B using “cheap rails”.
Beijing lucky draw scheme = Thumbs down
Excess Subways = Thumbs up
(Beijing-Shanghai High Speed Rail = Thumbs, both those on hands and feet, ALL UP.) ;-)
Compared with Shanghai scheme, Beijing’s practice is more fair. Because under SH scheme, the richer the buyer is, the larger the possibility for him to get a plate.