52 brand-new buses only picking up dust

Fifty-two school buses that could be picking up students have been parked in a wasteland in East China's Wenling city for almost a year.

But perhaps that will change.

"We have discussed with the owners of the vehicles about cooperating in the future," Wang Mingde, manager of an education group based in Ningbo, in Zhejiang province, said on Friday.

The brand-new American buses cost 20 million yuan ($3.2 million) to buy last year, said Li Renyi, president of the Anhui Commerce Association in Taizhou, Zhejiang province, one of the owners of the vehicles.

But for almost a year, they have been in a yard in the Zhishengzhuang village of Wenling, also in Zhejiang province.

Surprisingly, the yellow vehicles did not receive much notice until someone posted online that people had started to use them as toilets.

"The information online was wrong," said Wang, adding that he had checked the vehicles on Thursday and that they are in good condition.

The reason the buses were neglected for a year is because they failed to get approval from local education and traffic departments to pick up students, which is required by national law.

Li and other members of the association wanted to start a company to provide school buses for schools in Wenling in July 2013.

But the city's education bureau rejected their proposal, saying its existing 51 school buses were sufficient.

The deserted vehicles can't be called school buses since they were never used for schools, according to a statement by the Wenling city government on Thursday.

Last October, Li registered a company for rental cars. But lacking official approval, the vehicles remained parked.

"I received a verbal promise allowing us to enter the school bus market; thus, we placed the order for the school buses in July," Li Renyi told China National Radio on Friday.

The conflict between the association and the government was ongoing on Friday.

In addition to the rejected approval, the shrinking domestic school bus market is yet another hurdle.

In the first six months of the year, 8,751 school buses from 45 major domestic producers were sold in China, 32 percent fewer than in the same period of 2013, according to statistics from a bus information network.

She Zhenqing, an expert in buses with the China Highway Association, said the demand for school buses exists, but to fuel the weak market, the government needs to release some encouraging policies.