There’s like a 15% tariff on imported cars (from memory), they’re definitely over priced there and always have been. There’s foreign brands thar aren’t imported, ie produced locally. For a while GM Shanghai was making a fuck load of cars there but its slowly been tapering off. My CN Telsa was bit cheaper than the same one in the US. But I couldn’t tell you that it’s apples for apples, sometimes the local model of something is cheaper because it’s made of cheaper stuff.
The bigger issue for big city china when buying a car is the plates. If its an ICE the cost of getting plates can be 100x that of a EV. Regardless of where it’s made.
As for stuffing products in a friendly customer or by some kind of stupid regulation is not common but happens. There is a complex web of incestuous company ownership and an equally complex web of influence and indirect ownership by the government. If someone needs to hit their numbers real bad it’s possible they’ll ask / insist / regulate that another company buys up to help make it happen. There are a few laws that are supposed to prevent it, but if nobody complains then probably nobody investigates.
I’ve seen this happen a few times with stuff much cheaper than diggers.
Fun salad fingers story. When it first came out it was a hit in our circle of friends. It was also hosted on a website called fat-pie.com
One girl wanted to show her friend and her friends mum at their place, so she just googled “fat pie” on front of everyone.
Salad fingers was not above the fold in the search results. It was especially bad because her friend was a bit tubby.