A Shuanghuan SCEO SUV seen near Chaoyang Park in east Beijing in 2010. The car looked nice in Chengguan livery but it also looked a bit tired. Always hard at work, we bet.
The Chengguan is a somewhat controversial local government agency, operating at city level. Their official English name is the Urban Management and Law Enforcement Bureau. The agency is tasked with enforcement of urban management rules of a city.
Examples are fining street vendors, closing public toilets for some hygienic problem, fining folks for discarding their garbage in the wrong basket, taking care of parking violations, and more such happy stuff.
A less-well known Changguan task is public order in public parks, including in Beijing’s Chaoyang Park.
The agency uses all kinds of cool vehicles, ranging from small electric city patrol cars to pickup trucks. But this Shuanghuan SCEO is probably the best.
Like the Chengguan, the SCEO is controversial. It was launched in China in 2005 and was widely seen as a bad copy of the BMW X5. It was powered by a 2.4 liter four-cylinder petrol engine sourced from Shenyang-Mitsubishi. When Shuanghuan launched the SCEO in Europe in 2007 it was sued by BMW. Sales in Germany were forbidden but the SCEO sold in small numbers in some other European countries, mainly in Italy.
The Shuanghuan brand was owned by a company called Shijiazhuang Shuanghuan Automobile, based in the great city of Shijiazhuang in Hebei Province. Shuanghuan also made the Noble, a bad copy of the Smart. In 2016 the company closed its doors.
The badge of the Beijing Chengguan. Sadly, the SCEO is unlikely to be with the Chengguan still. It was likely scrapped long ago or stands rusting away in a dark corner of an agency parking lot.