Auto sales are so strong in China that an unusual conspiracy theory has circulated on Western stock markets this month: the Chinese government must be secretly buying hundreds of thousands of cars and parking them somewhere.

Well that is obviously poor journalist’s humour. But still, how could you explain that gas sales in China have a flat evolution this year, while car sales have increased?

Kevin Wale, the president of General Motors China, said that automakers knew who was buying their cars and saw no evidence of a car-buying conspiracy. Sharp improvements in fuel economy — partly because of government mandates and partly because of a shift to smaller cars — help explain the slow growth in gasoline sales, he said.

China reports all confirm: rising car sales for second half of 2009 but...

Also, regulations that have been recently applied in China on gas prices and fuel use might have balanced the bigger numbers of cars with fewer miles driven. So could we conclude that Chinese drivers are indeed more numerous but drive less? Possibly, taking into account the huge number of cars strolling down the streets of Chinese cities each morning.

From the New York Times:

In interviews over the last three weeks in Kunming in southwestern China, in Nantong in east-central China and here in Guangzhou in southeastern China, residents complained of cars being sold out at dealerships because many people wanted to buy as incomes rose, loans became available and extensive new highways opened.

Li Qi, a 45-year-old lumber dealer who already owns a 40-inch flat-panel television and a BMW 325i sedan, sat at a table near the end of the long row of dealerships in Guangzhou on a recent afternoon and disconsolately peeled an egg that had been hard-boiled in tea. He complained of missing his chance to buy a Land Rover S.U.V. when he saw several in a dealership last month.

“I wanted to think about it, and now they are gone,” he said, adding that he had just put his name on a monthlong waiting list.

Another theory is that rising car sales do not actually translate, all of the times and in all geographical ares, into higher overall gas consumption. Read below.

....but no rise in gas sales or even reduced fuel consumption!

Also from the NY Times:

Stephen Green, an economist in the Shanghai office of Standard Chartered, calculated that the number of registered cars in China would rise 24 percent this year, a little more than half the growth rate in sales. Older, less fuel-efficient cars are being retired and replaced with fuel-sipping models, he said in a report on Nov. 16.

Light industry accounts for 40 percent of gasoline consumption in China and has slowed because of global economic difficulties, while commercial light trucks are also big users of gasoline and are probably being driven fewer miles because of weaker demands for freight movements, he wrote.

All in all, this is an oddity, a peculiar string of cause and effect (or lack of effect maybe?) even for China. While it fuels negativist rumours that China is frauding statistics and sale reports, it still confirm one thing: China is an unpredictable automotive market, and an unpredictable and volatile country as whole.