China is Volkswagen’s single-largest market, and the company vies with General Motors as the country’s biggest automaker. But Volkswagen’s diesel scandal is unlikely to have many repercussions in China.

That is because Volkswagen sells almost no diesel cars in China — fewer than 1,000 of the three million or so the company sells each year in the country, wher gasoline engines reign.

It is not for lack of trying on Volkswagen’s part.

The company, hoping to replicate its success elsewher as a diesel leader, lobbied Beijing for the better part of a decade to let it build diesel-powered cars in China. But regulators in China, which imports more than half of its oil, have repeatedly rebuffed those pleas — partly over environmental concerns and partly because the government has preferred to reserve relatively scarce diesel fuel for trucks and farm tractors.

As a result, the only diesel-powered cars Volkswagen sells in China are imported from Europe and are sold mainly to taxi fleets.

The environmental concerns have been raised by Chinese regulators who were in frequent contact with American experts, notably at the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit research group. The council is the same group that documented the performance shortfalls of Volkswagen diesels in the United States and brought the matter to the Environmental Protection Agency.

American researchers have long been more worried than European experts that diesel emissions might be carcinogenic. In addition, diesel exhaust tends to have more particulates than gasoline engine emissions. Particulates are a big health concern in dusty northern China, and they add to the notoriously bad air pollution in Beijing itself.

Making matters worse is that, until fairly recently, many Chinese refineries lacked the technology to remove much of the naturally occurring sulfur contaminants when they produced diesel from crude oil. The resulting high pollution when diesel was burned as truck fuel made regulators wary of allowing the nation’s fast-growing car fleet to burn diesel as well.

Another predicament in China for Volkswagen involves Chinese consumers. The car-buying public has long been skeptical of diesels, associating them with tractors and viewing them as unsophisticated. Company executives had long expressed confidence, though, that they could change these perceptions with an energetic advertising and public relations effort — if only they could win permission to mass-produce diesels in China.

Diesels have long offered a trade off — higher air pollution, even with cleanly refined diesel, but also better fuel economy. Europe is a market that highly prizes fuel economy, with some of the world’s most stringent gas mileage standards. China and the United States have somewhat less stringent mileage standards, although they can still be hard for automakers to meet if they produce a lot of big cars and sport utility vehicles. As a European automaker, Volkswagen developed a lot of expertise in building fuel-efficient diesels and started its Chinese diesel lobbying efforts around 2000.

Since 2008 or so, though, Volkswagen executives have pushed less hard for Chinese diesels. That may be because they began manufacturing expensive but fuel-efficient models of gasoline engines in China. This enabled the company to meet Chinese fuel-economy standards without needing to resort to diesel engines.

And those three million cars a year it sells in China indicate that the company is still finding buyers, even with the more expensive engines.

“After 2008, they did not have a strong motive to promote diesel,” said Yale Zhang, the managing director of Automotive Foresight, a Shanghai consulting firm.