General Motors has launched four new Cadillacs in China, spurred on by the increasing prosperity in the fast growing country. The cars will be priced between $63,580 and $95,340. China Daily reports that luxury car sales in China rose 24.5 percent in the first eight months of the year, and Rolls-Royce says that China is now the carmaker’s third largest market due to the growing class of entrepreneurs.

Luxury cars are nevertheless a tiny part of the Chinese car market, but the interest of Western manufacturers does reflect the increasing transformation of the Chinese economy from communist to capitalist. In the ten years to 2002, car ownership more generally in China increased by a factor of ten, amounting to roughly one car for every 120 people.

Chairman Mao’s socialist “Great Leap Forward” caused millions of deaths and economic ruin. But the fastest, deepest liberalisation programme the world has ever seen has put China on the fast track of double-digit growth.