Abstract
China's auto industry has seen rapid growth in recent years. In 2009, China produced 13.79 million units of automobiles and became the world's top automobile maker and automobile market—This rapid expansion of the automobile industry in China continued in 2010 and both sales and production topped 18 million units. This paper focuses on the factors that led China to become an enormous automobile-producing country and analyzes ongoing changes in Chinese automobile industry. Special attention is given to the rise of Chinese domestic manufacturers and projections for their future performance. China is an exceptional country in the world in which domestic companies one after another are launching into the automobile industry, and the article shows that governmental industrial policy and recent structural changes in automobile consumption are promoting such behavior. Nevertheless, raising the level of product development and improving parts manufacturing capacity still remains problem for Chinese domestic auto manufacturers.
