China's car sales soar 55% to 8.2m: By any standards, China's car market has experienced the most extraordinary year

摘要

China, which like the rest of the world's major car markets started last year with almost universally shared predictions of gloom and doom, has ended 2009 with a bang. Kicked into overdrive by an evidently concerned government with a host of demand boosting measures helped catapult last year's sales into stratospheric new heights. The effects of last year's consumer borrowing binge in China are laid bare by figures showing a huge 55.1 cent surge in last year's car sales to 8.2m units. That's more than twice the number of passenger cars sold during the same year in Japan, which still ranked as Asia's biggest car market as recently as 2006.