In the tradition of Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, Chinese IT billionaire Jia Yeuting has announced he is developing an electric car that he would like to manufacture in China. According to Bloomberg News, China has been seeking to encourage the production of electric cars for sometime, and Mr. Jia’s venturing into this field is mainly due to the vast amounts of pollution he sees in his country’s skies.

Jia Yeuting is a fascinating individual. Bloomberg’s brief profile of him states:

Jia got his start in technology as a 22-year-old technical support officer maintaining the internal network of a county taxation bureau in China’s coal-producing Shanxi province.

He quit after less than a year to start a company providing consulting services to technology firms, before founding handset distributor Sinotel Technologies Ltd. in 2002, taking it public five years later in Singapore, according to the company’s latest annual report.

Jia founded Leshi in 2004, and the Beijing-based company had its initial public offering in 2010 in Shenzhen. Leshi has a larger market value than Youku Tudou Inc., the New York-traded Internet TV company, and Jia’s 44 percent stake is worth about $2.3 billion at current market prices.

With all due respect to Mr. Jia’s embrace of electric vehicles, there is more than meets the eye to them and they will not produce the benefits proponents claim. Skeptical environmentalist Dr. Bjorn Lomborg was interviewed about this subject a short time ago and describes their dirty secret.