There are, mostly within China. But obviously the strategy has been to leapfrog the competition and to go all in on battery tech and EVs rather than trying to play catch-up on soon-to-be obsolete tech.
There are, but they were working mostly for internal market. Their brand recognition is not good with the western audience. But now with the electric cars - it is a brand new thing, so the chinese brands can try to push in the western markets.
I did not think the other replies were very adequate so adding my thoughts.
There are a lot of chinese ICE manufacturers. Even before that, there were a number of Euro/American brands that were manufacturering in China for the domestic market. In the beginning these brands were not seen as high quality or reliable. You would pay a premium for a vehicle that was not manufactured domestically, regardless if it was a domestic or foreign brand. Things have changes significantly over the last 10 years. Quality has greatly improved and there is a significant sense of national pride for these brands, which I think only helps if further the desire for these brands to build better products.
The timing of quality improvements and the new global market demand for EV makes it a great time to expand. If they were to expand into the US market with an ICE platform, they would have had to fight the long uphill battle like Hyundai did to make a name for themselves.
The article has a nice graph where you can see Chinese had a 20 - 25% market share and the Western/Japanese has the remainder in the ICE era. Suddenly in the last years the Western/Japanse traditional manufacturers are squeezed to 40% and the trend looks, well, devastating.
So yeah, the made ICEs but also in the home market that was not a convincing product.
I was always under the impression it was less about red tape and more about safety standards. Most foreign cars do not meet the safety standards required in the US/EU. My favorite example is in Mexico, Toyota had a model that was more or less the same style of an early 90s Toyota. You could still buy them new in ~2016, they had no upgrades to safety etc, you would never be able to sell them in the US.
I remember vaguely on one Chinese car in Eastern Europe cca 1 year ago, which was cheapish, but made from cheap plastics, squeaking, infotainment was booting 30 seconds and ICE engine, despite its relatively small volume was taking 10 liters per 100km. I don't think that they have sold many of them.
