Sales of passenger cars in China grew almost 10 percent last month from a year earlier despite broader concerns about a slowdown in both the overall automobile business and the Chinese economy as a whole.1 With auto sales in Brazil, India and Russia struggling to live up to the BRIC hype of a few years ago, the Chinese market remains the global auto industry’s best bet for sustained growth. One problem: the Chinese government. A wave of recent intervention suggests that the good times for the world’s automakers have increasingly come at the expense of China’s strategic auto-industry goals.