Gao of Beihang University says the number of business jets in China almost doubled from 2010 to 2011 and the new orders for business jets from China is about 20 percent of orders worldwide.

Bombardier says in its report that worldwide demand for business jets correlates with wealth creation, which is largely driven by economic growth.

A report in 2010 by Forbes said there were 1,011 billionaires in the world, 27 percent more than the previous year. The biggest rise was in China, where the number more than doubled to 107.

In China the increasing number of billionaires and multi-millionaires has also driven up sales of other aircraft, such as helicopters.

At the start of this year Bell Helicopter of the US, which first entered China in 1979, had 24 helicopters in service in the country; the company says that it will end the year with almost double that.

"China represents the largest potential market in the world," says John Garrison, president and CEO of Bell Helicopter. "According to the recent forecasts there is a projected need for as many as 2,000 helicopters in China."

Bell says he believes the country "can easily support" 2,000 helicopters in 10 years as the pace of airspace regulation reforms picks up.

But China still lacks infrastructure such as airports for general aviation, and personnel, such as pilots and product support and maintenance, he says.

With the stringent airspace rules, those two areas have been seen as a serious obstacle to the development of general aviation in China.

"You can have as many aircraft as you want, but without the infrastructure it is like having a Ferrari sitting in the middle of a rice field but with no roads to drive," says Jan Fridrich, vice-president of the Light Aircraft Association of the Czech Republic.

The Czech Republic is a good case study of a country that has built a light aircraft industry from scratch. In just 10 years it has grown to an industry that produces 350 aircraft a year with an export value of 36 million euros, Fridrich says. The key is to provide a complete system of infrastructure essential to the industry, he says.

Just as the car industry has been turbocharged as roads have been built across the country, a thriving general aviation sector cannot grow without a highly developed network of airports.

There are now reckoned to be about 92 million automobiles in China, and many of them are now being driven on roads that have sprung up in the past year. In 2011 slightly more than 55,000 kilometers of road were opened, about 9,000 km of that being motorways, China's statistics bureau says. In 1992 less than 2,400 km of road were built.

Investment in large infrastructure has obviously been a huge driving force in the country's economy, and investment in general aviation is forecast to play a similar role. More importantly, unlike large infrastructure dominated by investment from state-owned enterprises, the building of general aviation airports may well be open to foreign investors as well as private Chinese companies.