A Chinese podcast · Same story, 4 levels
买下沃尔沃的那个人交班了：他把公司交给了一个不姓李的人
The Man Who Bought Volvo Just Handed His Carmaker to Someone Who Is Not Family
About this story
On 17 August 2026 Geely Auto announced that founder Li Shufu, 63, was stepping down as chairman. He built the group from fridge parts and motorcycles, was refused a car-making licence, and told officials: please give me one chance to fail. He got it in 2001, bought Volvo from Ford for $1.8bn in 2010, and led China's domestic brands on sales by 2017. His successor is An Conghui, a professional manager raised inside the company — not his son, which is the default in Chinese private business. Li barred his own brothers from management once carmaking began, and said in 2006 that the company could not be run by him alone. Chinese listening practice at four levels. HSK 2 Chinese listening practice.
This is an HSK 2 Chinese listening episode that runs about 3 minutes. The full Mandarin script is shown with tap-for-pinyin and a line-by-line English translation, so you can listen and read at once — comprehensible input in the sense of Stephen Krashen's i+1 theory. It teaches 12 key vocabulary words such as 公司、机会、失败 and walks through 3 grammar patterns, each explained in English with examples. The same news story is retold at 4 difficulty levels — use the level selector above to find the version that is challenging but still understandable for you.
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原文Read the complete story in Chinese. Reveal pinyin and English only when you need them.
English transcript reference
This August, China's Geely Auto put out an announcement.
Founder Li Shufu is no longer chairman.
It sounds like a small thing, but what it says is not small.
First, about Li Shufu himself.
He is sixty-three this year.
Sixty-three is not all that old.
His company has been going for forty years.
At the start it did not make cars.
It made fridges, and it made motorcycles.
Fridges and motorcycles are not cars.
The motorcycles sold extremely well, and he was rich early on.
By then he did not need to do anything else.
So when he said he was going to make cars, a lot of people did not understand.
Making cars takes a great deal of money, and it could easily fail.
He had money, but making cars needed more money than he had.
In the end he started anyway.
At the time, making cars required a licence from the state, and he could not get one.
He went to the official in charge and said a line that became famous.
He said: please give me one chance to fail.
Please give me one chance to fail.
That is exactly how he put it.
Two years later, he got the licence.
What really changed Geely was buying Volvo.
Volvo is an old European marque.
Geely bought it from Ford in America.
The price was one point eight billion dollars.
One point eight billion dollars is a great deal of money.
At the time a lot of people thought it was impossible.
A small Chinese company, buying an old European marque.
But it worked.
Geely really did buy Volvo.
After buying Volvo, Geely's cars got better.
Later, Geely sold more than any other Chinese domestic brand.
Now back to the handover.
In China, when a boss gets old, he usually hands the company to his son.
Li Shufu did not do that.
He did not hand the company to his son.
The person he chose is not called Li.
That person is not family.
That person worked his way up inside Geely step by step.
In fact you could see this coming.
When Li Shufu first went into business, he did it together with his brothers.
But once he started making cars, he stopped letting his brothers hold management jobs.
He once said: this company cannot be run by me alone.
He also said he wants to build a company that lasts a hundred years.
So this handover was not decided on the spur of the moment.
He had been thinking about it for more than twenty years.
That said, Li Shufu has not stepped back entirely.
He is still chairman of Geely Holding Group.
For a company to last a hundred years, the first hard part is the handover.
Now put yourself in it.
You have a very big company.
You are old, and your child wants to take over.
Do you hand it to them, or to someone who has been with you for twenty years?
Listen again
Try it without the transcript and notice what sounds clearer.
What vocabulary does this episode teach?
词汇HSK 2. 公司光靠我一个人是管理不了的 — the sentence he said twenty years before acting on it.
HSK 3. 请给我一次失败的机会 — repeated twice in the script on purpose, because it is the line everyone knows.
HSK 3. Appears in both the warning he was given and the request he made.
HSK 3. 不让兄弟在公司里当管理 — the decision that made everything else possible.
He started the business with them and then barred them from management. That is the whole thesis.
HSK 3. Used for the state licence he could not get.
创始人李书福不做董事长了 — the opening line, and the whole news in six characters.
He gave up this title at the listed company and kept it at the holding group — the distinction matters.
做汽车要国家给一个资格 — what blocked him was not money.
The business that made him rich, and therefore the reason nobody understood him.
沃尔沃是欧洲的老牌子 — 老牌子 is exactly what made the purchase implausible.
Literally "hand over the shift". The plainest Chinese word for succession.
* beyond level超纲词
What grammar patterns appear in this episode?
语法……比……还……
Even more X than Y. Placing 还 after 比 pushes the comparison past what the listener expected.
他有钱，可是做汽车要的钱，比他的钱还多。
还是 + V 了
Went ahead anyway. 还是 concedes every objection just raised and then does the thing regardless.
后来他还是开始了。
不是……想出来的
It was not arrived at by X. Used to reject a reading of a decision — here, that it was made on the spur of the moment.
所以这次交班，不是临时想出来的。
他想了二十多年。
Proper nouns
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