The largest IPO in the U.S. this year was Detroit auto maker General Motors Co., but Chinese companies grabbed an outsized amount of attention from American investors in 2010.

A record 38 initial public offerings from China-based businesses listed this year in the U.S., raising $4 billion, with slightly more than half of them hitting the market after Labor Day, according to data from Dealogic. Last week's IPO from information-technology outsourcing services firm iSoftStone Holdings Ltd. was the last of the bunch; the IPO market is on a winter break until January. Bankers expect another busy year for offerings from China in 2011.

The average amount raised by Chinese offerings this year was minuscule compared with GM's $23.1 billion common- and preferred-stock deal in November, and the number of Chinese offerings made up only a quarter of the total U.S. IPO market in 2010. But when it came to first-day performances, they were whoppers. The best pop of the year came from Internet television company Youku.com Inc., which rose 161% on its first day of trading this month. That was the best debut since Baidu, also Chinese, jumped 354% in 2005. Second-best of the year was ChinaCache International Holdings Ltd., an Internet content and application delivery provider, which gained 95% on its first day in October.

Not every offering was a winner. The worst and second-worst debuts were also claimed by Chinese companies; mobile app seller Sky-Mobi Ltd. and film distributor Bona Film Group Ltd. lost 25% and 22%, respectively, on their first days this month.

But the combination of "Chinese" and "Internet" sent investors scrambling for shares this year, with the six stocks that fit that category generating an average first-day gain of 79.5%, according to data from Ipreo. The remaining Chinese offerings returned a more modest average of 5.9% when they went public. That disconnect followed through in the stocks' performances after their first days, says Ipreo, with Internet-focused companies from China returning an average of 44.7% from their IPO price to Friday's close, and the remainder returning 20.9%.

Looking ahead, there are 67 IPOs in the U.S. backlog headed into 2011, and less than a dozen are based in China, according to Dealogic's data. But those numbers can be misleading, because foreign issuers must go through a longer regulatory review with the Securities and Exchange Commission before they can publicly release their IPO prospectuses.

While a U.S. company might file a preliminary prospectus on the SEC's website and update it six times over the course of four months as it responds to questions from regulators, a foreign issuer's prospectus appears on the site only after it has been thoroughly vetted, and the deal usually goes on to price within a few weeks. Only the SEC and bankers are aware of the size of the so-called shadow pipeline of Chinese deals working behind the scenes now with the SEC to launch in 2011, and bankers say it looks like it will be another busy year for new stocks from the Far East.

"There's a hidden backlog which is enormous," says William B. Buchanan Jr., chief executive of Lazard Capital Markets. "The coming year is likely to be even bigger than this one."