As a scout in Ford's remorseless quest to find Chinese business partners, Gerald Kania had visited enough gritty industrial capitals in three years to think that he could zip through Nanchang and head home. Sun Min changed Kania's mind. In April 1995, Sun, chairman of the Jiangling Motor Corp., discovered he had just missed a visit from Kania and his five-man team of Ford explorers. Sun ordered a lieutenant to fetch them from the airport. "I had only an hour's talk with them and told them explicitly what I was interested in," he recalls with a wry smile. The head of China's eighth largest truckmaker, lean and youthful for his 60 years, rattled off a proposal peppered with impressive detail about Ford and its hot-selling van, the Transit. "He obviously has vision and is very dedicated to his company," says Kania. "We love that." So much so that last June, after only two months of talks, the Americans were ready to buy one-quarter of Jiangling for $40 million. Says Kania: "They wanted us, and we wanted them."

Now that they have what they want, Ford and Jiangling just have to get what they need. In China's ultracompetitive market, Sun needs regular infusions of cash, technology and expertise to convert Jiangling into a successful manufacturer. For Ford, the goals are much more complicated. Jiangling is the American company's first shot at full-scale vehicle production, but it still doesn't offer what General Motors, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda and others already have: a passenger-car venture. Sun and Kania both want to make cars. Yet China's car market, about 350,000 vehicles annually, is awash in excess production, and Nanchang, a backwater in southeastern Jiangxi province, is not on the government's map as an automobile-production hub. So for the time being, the two companies must concentrate on the task at hand: producing 60,000 Transits annually by the year 2000.

Therein lies a study in marrying business-school capitalism to party-school opportunism. When China's auto-industry officials assigned Sun to rescue Jiangling in 1984, the firm had been losing money for a decade and was operating at a wasteful 50% of its capacity--in short, a typical state-owned company. A pragmatic engineer with a nose for controversy, he was inexplicably disinvited to last year's provincial Communist Party congress. Sun signed a deal with Isuzu in 1984 to make light trucks, and within months the company was edging back toward profitability. In 1994 Sun caught the next capitalist wave, persuading Citibank's Hong Kong office to help find a new foreign partner, this time to purchase shares in Jiangling, to be traded on the Shenzhen stock exchange.

Having bought 25% of those shares, Ford must finish the transformation Sun started. It won't be easy. While "the Chairman," as he is known by the Ford people, may be a capable manager, his company still makes only 23,000 trucks a year with 6,100 workers. The China factory is overstaffed, but Sun won't pare the work force because in China, it is very difficult to fire workers at a state enterprise. Ford is hoping to grow into it.

Meanwhile, turning Jiangling around is not the only challenge faced by the expatriate workers trickling into Ford's Nanchang office. If the summer heat and frigid winters don't wear them down, the language barrier and Communist bureaucracy will. For their part, Sun's troops face their own troubles bridging the cultural divide. This spring, 10 young engineers traveled to Ford's design center in Britain to configure the Transit's engine and rear axle to withstand China's rutted roads--a job they must complete by year's end in order to get the van into production by late 1997. Yet six weeks into it, the program nearly folded when it encountered difficulties. "We spent a lot of time on basic communication," says Qi Xiaogang, 33, chief engineer of the redesign. "They would say yes--but did that mean 'Yes' or 'Maybe'?"

Other joint ventures have practically failed because of such misunderstandings. In 1991 General Motors struck a deal with another of the Chinese auto industry's visionaries, Zhao Xiyou, who promised that a small pickup-truck venture would eventually lead to bigger projects. By last year barely a dozen pickups had been sold, the Chinese partner was on the verge of collapse, and Beijing forced the operation to merge with one of the country's largest concerns, First Auto Works--without informing GM ahead of time. If Ford learns from mistakes like that, then going into the China market late may have served Dearborn well. "This is about building a business now, not just doing a project," says Michael Dunne, president of Asia Automotive Research, a consulting firm. A Chinese auto-industry official is more pointed. Says he: "Whether Ford succeeds in the long term depends on how much it is willing to bleed."

--With reporting by Mia Turner/Beijing