Do you mind point some examples?
Payments via AliPay and WePay were technically illegal before they were legalized post facto after they became popular. A western company could have never gone near that.
All the western companies pay income tax on private health insurance benefits, while all the Chinese companies don't, because the law is unclear.
Huh. Sounds like a certain transportation company...
I didn't bother talking about Didi because of Uber.
Are you saying that Baidu was directing traffic to health care scams willingly?
Interesting remark on AliPay & WePay. I wonder what kind of agreements Chinese gov made with those companies after the fact.
Here's as good as any point to remember that a warrant canary disappeared from Apple's privacy text about a year ago. Before it was about "we will protect user's privacy".. then there was a big "privacy" announcement that had text about following the law etc. IMHO gov got to them and it's understandable - companies exist in frameworks set by governments. It's in Apple's best interest to comply with them. To suggest otherwise is a political stance, not an economic one.
China doesn't have rule of law, so everything is illegal but nothing is, if you can navigate that contradiction, then you just have to make sure your context isn't bad enough to be cracked down on. The same was true with Didi and anti-black cab laws (but Uber operates in the gray margins of those laws all the time, so there was no point in mentioning that).
China doesn't really care about your idealism. If you go against the government's interests, they will beat you down. This is one thing the Chinese companies get really well and allow them to play fast and lose with the law as long as they adhere to that one principal.
it is also highly laughable for your private health insurance joke. there is _no_ Chinese law requiring any company to provide _private_ health insurance to anyone. Public healthcare levy is required by the law, that is all.
Something like that is nearly unthinkable in the US or Western Europe. It would be equivalent to Jeff Bezos spinning off AWS and giving himself 2/3 ownership of it, without approval from AMZN shareholders.
The heart of your argument is that a corporation is executing a transaction that could possible be illegal elsewhere: the US or Western Europe is better because this would not be possible here.
If that is your argument, I can think of two examples off the top of my head:
1. Goldman Sachs executive in 1MDB scandal 2. Banks offloading their mortgage-back securities positions by selling the directly opposite positions to their clients
Corporations executing shady transactions in the US or Western Europe is not as uncommon or "unthinkable" as you might imagine. Your argument stems from a enthocentric point of view and romanticizing one system over another by neglecting all the bad from one side.
I also fail to see how Chinese companies has anything related to my argument. Just because Chinese companies were involved doesn't weaken it.
You are seeing things through tinted shades before you even have the chance to analyze my argument. You are framing the argument as China vs US. I am pointing out the flaw in op's argument. See the difference ;). Your reply was rude.
[1] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081214/5-thin...
I'm not really sure if its a rule of law issue (though China definitely has problems there). One problem is that western companies generally must follow the law in China because they are easy to make examples of while their lawyers won't sign off on anything "shady." Chinese companies, however, have no such limitations, and will bend the rules all the time, often with minimal consequences.