BizChina

The Chinese will buy 16.7 million passenger cars and light commercial vehicles this year, about five million more than consumers in the U.S., according to the most recent research by J.D. Power and Associates. Driven by China’s rising middle class, breakneck development of suburbs and roads, and drastically reduced tariffs on automobile imports since 2001, a torrent of cars is choking Chinese cities in traffic and pollution. Convinced that a market existed for car rentals, Shanghai-born Ray Zhang, the founder and former chief executive officer of logistics software maker Adelph in Emeryville, Calif., returned to China in 2005 and launched eHi Car Rental a year later with $5 million in venture capital, promoting renting as a greener alternative to owning.

China's Ministry of Commerce said Saturday it has decided to extend anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigations into US-made off-road vehicles and sedans with an engine displacement of 2.0 liters and above.

The extension is for six months, until May 6, 2011, the ministry said in a statement on its website.

The ministry made the decision because the two cases are "special" and "complicated," the statement said without elaborating.

China launched the anti-dumping and anti-subsidy probes on Nov 6, 2009, after the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers complained that US carmakers had unfairly benefited from 31 government subsidy programs.

Over the coming decades, will Asia replace the United States as the center of the pharmaceutical world? One of the drug industry’s central figures thinks so.

Dennis Gillings is the 66-year-old founder and chief executive of Quintiles Transnational, a research outsourcing firm that has played a role getting all of the world’s top-selling medicines to market. By correctly predicting the future of the drug industry, he has made a fortune. Forbes estimates his Quintiles stake is worth $700 million. He was among the first to understand that clinical research would be outsourced, that studies would move overseas to Asia, India, and Eastern Europe, and that drug companies would need outsourced sales. As a result, Quintiles now has annual sales of $3 billion. (Click here for my profile of Quintiles from the current issue of Forbes.)

Now Gillings sees Asia – and particularly China – playing an increasingly dominant role in the way that drugs are invented, tested, and regulated, endangering what he says is a “strategic” industry for the U.S.

General Motors Co. and its long-time Chinese partner SAIC Motor Corp. said Wednesday they signed an agreement to deepen their technical cooperation and further integrate SAIC into GM's global product-development system.

The move is intended to allow the two companies to share technology and experience more widely to support the joint development of electric cars and components, GM and SAIC said in a joint press release. It is also aimed at creating a greater role for their joint research and technical center in Shanghai in the development of future vehicles and engines.