[celticninja]

You can buy bitcoin with cash via localbitcoins.com in most countries except Germany (or at least, with a German IP address).

In China it seems the preference is to buy bitcoin mining equipment in yuan and generate bitcoin to sell, taking advantage of the cheap electricity available in China and writing off some of the capital investment via tax. Although there is significant trade on Chinese exchanges much of this is often thought to be suspect due to the lack of trading fees which means fake/self trades are available at no cost.