It seems like the entire Zongshen factory workforce tuned out to see us off. And I never call anyone awesome, preferring to save the word for descriptions of myself. The RX1 is the baby air-cooled 200cc version of the fire-breathing (compared to a 200cc) RX3 250 that everyone agrees is a great bike.Īlong with us for the adventure were an assortment of Chinese riders selected by riding ability and social media savvy: Leen, Dong, Lou, Mr. These motorcycles rolled off the assembly line and onto the highway.
I hate to use a cliché but Factory Fresh is accurate in this case. Our departure from Chongchen was delayed a day while Zongshen finished building new RX1 models that will also be tested alongside the RX3. High in the surrounding hills, Zuo Zongshen, the founder of it all, is said to live. We probably covered 5% of Zongshen’s vast factory/employee housing complex situated in a park-like industrial setting. We made a pass through the robotics section on the factory floor and saw blue-clad Zongshen workers fitting up motorcycles on torrential assembly lines. These nifty 500cc diesel trucks sell for around $1700 US dollars.Īfter many, many fetes we flew to Chongchen where we toured Zongshen’s modern research and development shop and saw a sweet-looking 400cc, EFI, liquid-cooled parallel twin stuffed into a furry-bearded hipster’s brat-style frame.
It was downright embarrassing and proved excellent nourishment for our budding rock-star egos. Every Chinese person we met thought highly of us. The pots and cups stand elevated above the ever-deepening swill while we stand knee-deep in gifts of clothing and food. Half the tea brewed is wasted, dumped through the varnished wood grate of a specially made tea tray. We killed two days in Guangzhou honoring him with the local RX3 club, eating huge, 15-course meals and participating in tiny-table, spill-the-tea drinking rituals. The Chinese venerate university professors, authors and military veterans – so Berk, who is all of these things, is quite a celebrity in Chinese motorcycle circles. One of these days my travel-greed will land me in trouble, but until that time, my admiration for motorcycle manufacturers who invest in the literary arts will be both bountiful and heartfelt. My positive inclination towards Zongshen motorcycles grew into near zealotry. Luo tied a lucky red ribbon on the bumper of the Buick minivan, took us to our luxury hotel and loaned us wads of Chinese money. Luo walked us in ever-widening circles around the huge, glass-enclosed Guangzhou airport while Tracy admitted in passable English that neither of them knew where the heck their minivan was parked. Luo and Tracy, both employees of the Zongshen motorcycle company. So I was well-fed, hopelessly compromised journalistically and as rested as could be after 15 hours in the air with CSC’s public relations sensei Joe Berk when we stepped out of the airplane into the welcoming embrace of Mr. It’s a sad situation when a communist, government-operated airline’s economy class seating far exceeds our capitalist, free-enterprise first class passenger service.
History’s thin, ragged tear through time will record the early twenty-first century as the era when the American airline industry began its final descent. Without naps we could have been done in an afternoon. When the smoke cleared we rode more of China than the most hardcore Chinese motorcyclists will ever ride, visited more legendary archeological sites than an eighteenth-century British nobleman’s ne’er do well son and generally blew through as much of Zong’s money as possible until they tossed us out of the country.ĩ,000 kilometers in 40 days. These guys are serious about changing your opinion of Zongshen motorcycle reliability. Zong fired a 40-day, 9000-kilometer (5600-mile) publicity-seeking missile directly into the heart of the Middle Kingdom that vaporized the standard paper-magazine road test. It turns out Zongshen, the Big Daddy of Chinese motorcycle manufacturers and supplier to CSC motorcycles in California, was crazy enough. So who’d be crazy enough to foot the bill for another long distance 250cc ride? On that ride the RX3s ran fine and had nothing else to prove. After riding 5,000 miles through the Western States on CSC’s RX3 mini ADV motorcycle I figured the gig was up for me: Motorcycle manufacturers are usually left unsatisfied and hollow feeling whenever I butcher a motorcycle review.