您正在看的时事英语是:汽车制造商“加大马力”迎合中国新贵。 standing between a black $350,000 Lamborghini Gallardo and a yellow $460,000 Murcielago.

He described signing papers this week to open dealerships in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

"Chinese people love brands and have a good feeling about luxury, about extreme luxury," he said.

Ferrari announced last Saturday that it would open a string of dealerships across China. Aston Martin, the Ford Motor subsidiary that has supplied cars for many of the James Bond movies, said on Wednesday that it would enter the Chinese market next year.

Near the Lamborghini exhibit, it displayed an Aston Martin Vanquish with fake machine guns and rockets mounted on the front; the sports car is eXPected to go on sale here for more than $400,000 - spy gear not included.

In another hall stood the 760Li, BMW's most eXPensive model, which costs $250,000 here, including taxes. China accounted for more than a third of worldwide sales of the model last year, far more than any other country, said Andreas Kunz of BMW, the chief Beijing representative of the German automaker.

Many of the buyers of such cars are making fortunes in real estate. Construction cranes have punctuated the skylines of Chinese cities for two decades, but in recent months they have become even more numerous, lining major highways even in second-tier cities like Nanjing.

A variety of jests circulate here these days about how every other Chinese adult seems to be a real estate agent, or that property speculators with pocket calculators have supplanted the blue-collar toilers celebrated in Mao's era as the nation's model workers.

Mr. Wang fits the bill. After graduating from college, he returned to Beijing and became a developer, a skill, he said in English, that "I learned from my dad."

He declined to discuss his family in detail, saying that he only wanted to talk about his love of cars. He owns a Porsche 911 and a Subaru with an engine powered up to more than 500 horsepower.

Asked why a young driver with a taste for fast cars would spend nearly $1 million for a boulevard cruiser bigger than many American limousines, Mr. Wang replied that his chauffeur would drive the Maybach and that he planned to share the car with his family.

After the ceremony, faced with a crush of Chinese reporters with lots of questions, Mr. Wang fled up a staircase with the help of Maybach employees.

For all the wealth apparent here now, however, there are hints that the boom may not last. Alarmed by a recent acceleration of inflation, Chinese regulators have begun urging banks to lend more cautio