HONG KONG — 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, where gasoline engines reign.

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

The company, hoping to replicate its success elsewhere 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.