A GM failure could mean a world of hurt

"Those overseas businesses over the last several years almost uniformly have been quite profitable, and they have, in almost every case, been able to send dividends back to help us address funding issues in the U.S," GM Chairman and Chief Executive Rick Wagoner told members of the House Financial Services committee Friday, lobbying for a favorable vote this week on an aid plan.

Yet because the U.S. continues to be GM's largest single market in terms of revenue, with $115 billion in sales last year, and because it was founded by William Durant in Flint, Mich., more than a century ago, this truly global car company is still looked upon as a quintessentially American one.

Indeed, in two days of hearings last week, members of Congress repeatedly asked Wagoner, as well as the heads of Ford and Chrysler, to promise not to spend any of the bailout money on foreign operations.

So while 61% of Americans in a recent poll viewed the U.S. automakers as damaged beyond repair, and as Congress works to save the image of GM the American company, GM is a rising star in China.

The automaker's China operations include 11 plants and roughly 20,000 employees, not to mention a $250-million research campus in Shanghai.

On the line, workers like Ma Jianming, a technician in the quality department of the company's Shanghai Cadillac plant, can't imagine the company falling on hard times. Not with annual sales growth of at least 27% over the last four years.

"Many friends came to ask me if our company would be affected or even go bankrupt if our U.S. group goes bankrupt," Ma said. "But this is not the case. . . . We are still working overtime these days."

Five years ago, GM made almost no cars in China, and it sold roughly twice as many cars in the U.S. as it did in the rest of the world.

But with a rising middle class fueling demand in countries like Brazil, India and Russia, GM and other automakers see a golden opportunity for meteoric growth. And they are getting an assist from foreign governments eager to develop industry.

In the United States, the Big Three face crushing healthcare costs and restrictive dealer franchise laws, and are burdened with a factory network built to produce the gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles now collecting dust on dealer lots.

Abroad, however, GM operates clean and lean -- paying competitive salaries, benefiting from government-paid healthcare coverage, and producing small, economical vehicles geared to those markets.