WASHINGTON — With yesterday's announcement that General Motors will sell its Hummer brand to a Chinese heavy-equipment manufacturer, a symbol of fading American excess migrates to a nation eager to pick up the mantle.

China's Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company has agreed to buy the brand from GM, the two companies said yesterday, for less than $500 million, according to a source familiar with the transaction, well off its peak value of a decade ago.

The 7,000-pound gas guzzlers are rolling out of an environment that became increasingly hostile toward them and into one whose go-go industrialism and lack of regard for the environment — until very recently — resembled that found in the United States a century ago.

But the Hummer will not be embraced by everyone in China. The nation has a tiny but budding green movement that already has complained about its middle-class ostentatiousness and growing carbon footprint.

GM entered bankruptcy Monday with the promise of $30 billion in government assistance. As part of its downsizing, GM is trying to sell off brands that no longer fit the company's vision of its future. Hummer is the first to go. Saab has three bidders and 16 parties have expressed interest in Saturn, GM said yesterday.

All vehicles have detractors, but it's hard to imagine another that inspires such vitriol as the Hummer.

"It became sort of a symbol of the liberal left and environmentalists of everything that was horrible about the auto industry," David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research, said yesterday.

Even though a Chinese company will own Hummer, they will be manufactured at a Louisiana plant through at least 2011, temporarily safeguarding about 3,000 jobs, the companies said yesterday.

"The Hummer brand is synonymous with adventure, freedom and exhilaration, and we plan to continue that heritage by investing in the business, allowing Hummer to innovate and grow in exciting new ways under the leadership and continuity of its current management team," Tengzhong chief executive Yang Yi said.

Tengzhong is based in the manufacturing city of Chengdu, capital of the south-central province of Sichuan. The company is privately owned, but Beijing has final say on all overseas purchases by Chinese companies.

Even though Hummer will be owned by the Chinese, they will not be the primary customer.

"They'll sell them all over the world. It's really a world vehicle," Cole said. "A lot of them right now go to the Middle East," Cole said, where the Hummer's predecessor was designed to roam and where fuel is plentiful.

He named Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as top customers.