[quote]While I don’t do business there, the majority of my clients (oil/gas and Heavy Industrial) do and report back a quite different picture than you do. There is little to no protection of foreign IP, the Chinese government asserts primacy in all deals and is heavily involved, especially given that most of the Heavy Industry in China is either state run or state sponsored, and the local quality control is execrable.[/quote]

Try to do the same kind of business in Russia (or in Cambodia). Once you figure out how much money has to be put aside to bribe local officials of all levels just to keep your offices from being shut down, and how much money and paperwork is involved in getting the simplest piece of electronic equipment exported from the country, China will seem like a manna from heaven.

In a way, China is more capitalist than we are. We have the OSHA, and the EPA, and all sorts of other federal agencies which are relatively hard to bribe, and they all tend to keep private entrepreneurs on the straight and narrow. There’s nothing like that in China. I’m not saying that Chinese workers are necessarily more reliable or thorough than American workers, in fact, the opposite is most likely the case (which is why there’s still SOME manufacturing left in this country). You can’t rely on pre-existing capital equipment, even if it was “certified” by local officials. It’s up to you to provide quality control. But if you manage to put the project together by yourself, ample and cheap (if not very competent) workers are right there and knocking on your door, corruption is sufficiently suppressed, the export code is simple and transparent, there’s infrastructure that lets you get your “stuff” from the loading dock of your factory somewhere in Guangzhou province to the Port of Long Beach with minimal expenses, and that is what matters for a business man.