Here are a couple of eye openers from a New York Times article:

For the first nine months of 2009, for instance, Buick sold 312,798 vehicles in China; in the United States, it sold 72,389.

The idea of creating a new Buick in a design studio in China, as General Motors has done with the 2010 LaCrosse, is not as loopy as it might sound. Buicks have a certain cachet in China, dating back some eight decades to when the emperor bought one.

So, there are 1.346 billion Chinese. They like Buicks, they design Buicks, and they build them too.

Do you have the feeling US efforts to keep our economy moving are misguided in the long term? Our government messes around protecting manufacturers of steel pipe while the higher value-add, higher technology, higher skilled jobs are slipping away. Anyone for education?

Oh, and the car looks good.