Brilliance is a fairly young company. It was formed by entrepreunerial genius Mr Yang Rong, who was the first guy to get a chinese company listed on NYSE and HK.
Somehow he acquired a big chunk of Jinbei which was formerly state owned. Raised a lot of interest, had good people, big plans.
For some reason he wanted to put future car building programs such as the Brilliance cars and new engine plant in a new development in Ningbo. This upset the Liaoning province government who wanted everything to stay in shenyang, so they went to war against him.
He had to run off to USA where he is now in exile. As I understand it, the Liaoning guys investigated him in depth, and although most of his business (also had schools, medical interests etc) were legitimate, there was no adequate explanation of where his first 5 million RMB came from when he started out, and also that accorind to Chinese records there is no such person as Yang Rong. I don't know for sure that all this is true, but he has definitely run off.
There followed a period of unrest as Liaoning provincial government tried to get back control of Brilliance from the former directors that had been working for Yang Rong. I think this cost them some time during the critical period 03-05 say. Now all that in fighting is behind them, they got a new top man in early 2006 and we will see how it goes from here.
Nice 1.8T engine of course, and there will also be NA 1.4 1.6 1.8 and 2.0 variants. Alloy block/head, 16 valves, Euro Iv etc. There is also a drawing board V6.
