I was talking to a good friend about something similar recently: car pricing in China, but I'd imagine the same arguments apply with pricing of motorcycles. The apparently inflated pricing of imported, luxury cars in causing a bit of a stir at the moment in social media, the press and with the government. Long story short: even accounting for additional taxes and import duties, imported, luxury cars are still priced significantly higher here in China than they would be in other parts of the world.

Here are a couple of my theories on why manufacturers price things at a premium here in China:

1) The cost of doing business in China is higher than elsewhere in the world. Additional layers of bureaucracy, additional costs serving customers (say for example, perhaps "warranty claims" are for whatever reason, significantly higher here than elsewhere in the world) etc.

2) The risks of doing business in China is higher than elsewhere in the world, and the economic rewards need to be commensurate to those risks for manufacturers to justify opening and running a shop here.

3) What LJH said, because they can. Manufacturers will say that they don't force anyone to buy anything they sell, at whatever price it is they sell them at. So if you don't like the price, don't buy it.

I think no single explanation can account for the inflated pricing we get here in China, but rather a combination of all three of the above (and probably, mostly theory 3) and possibly other theories which I have yet to consider.

As much as I'm a consumer and would happily campaign for more 'reasonable' pricing of "things" here in China, I myself have to accept the fact that in a non-economically Marxist world, the pricing of "things" is dictated by what people are willing to pay for them. And enough people are willing to pay an inflated price for a product, then that will be the price of that product. -End of rant-