Coughing through the sour smell of success at the Beijing Motor Show

You cannot drive to the Beijing Motor Show's press preview. Well, you can, but when you arrive, there does not seem to be a parking lot anywhere in the vicinity of the hall where the event is held. And even if there were, you would need some Shawshank-style skills to transgress the senseless security perimeter that surrounds the venue; a busload of fellow reporters with a full light-and-siren police escort were turned away, repeatedly.

The mystery of this vehement effort at exclusivity only deepens when you enter the China International Exhibition Center—nine separate, cavernous chambers seemingly arrayed around a grid of narrow plazas, but in reality, a convolution of positive and negative space that would confound an Escherite Theseus. The only thing more constricted than the foot traffic here is the air circulation, with dysfunctional air conditioning causing temperatures to hover in the high 80s, off-gassing plumbing that makes the dross trench in a Mumbai slum seem like a Waterworks showroom, and distorted music percussing through the miasma in a manner seemingly designed to procure confessions.

"We're all worried about the Chinese taking over the world right now," a public relations flack said while fanning himself. "Can you imagine what they'll be able to accomplish when they get organized?"

Probably not manufacture a car that could compete outside a captive domestic market, if the vehicles displayed here by the local firms were any indication. If the Korean auto manufacturers are the new Japanese, the Chinese are the new old Koreans—or Yugoslavs. Chinese cars showcase an almost intemperate variety of disinspiration: slathered in a tinsel factory of plastic chrome, mimicking the most contemptible designs of the past two decades (Aztek, last-gen Impala, and Hummer H1 among them), and even seeming to provide the inspiration for Bentley's ignominious EXP 9F SUV concept. Attempting rescue from this Sino-banality was Chery's linked chain of insectoid electric @ant cars that simultaneously conjured hypermiling and "Human Centipede," a baleen Geely GE that made the bilious 2006 Chrysler Imperial concept look restrained, and rumors of a semi-autonomous BYD economy car that could be called up to your doorstep with a remote control — presumably for those Chinese ashamed at their inability to employ a chauffeur.