US auto giant General Motors, struggling to boost sales at home after emerging from bankruptcy, said on Friday that sales in China, the world's biggest car market, hit a record high in September.

GM and its Chinese partners saw sales rise to 181,148 units in September from 152,365 in August - a nearly 19-percent jump, and the latest in a series of single-month records stretching back to January.

The company's China sales for the first nine months of the year soared 55.6 percent to nearly 1.3 million units, another record, giving GM and its partners an estimated market share of 13.4 percent, GM said in a statement.