"Man," said GM design boss Ed Welburn, "this is the most exciting auto show I've been to in a long time. It's the wild, wild east." Welburn was on the Geely stand at the 2008 Beijing Auto Show, checking out the half-dozen or so concepts and all-new models rolled out just for this show by China's second largest domestic automaker.

"They don't know what the rules are," he said, referring to some of the weirder designs, "but that's okay. There's a lot of creativity here."