I’ve lived in China for six years. The consensus among Western businesspeople is that if you have a joint venture it’s not a matter of if you’ll be screwed but when. Once you find a good contact in a company, someone who will deliver you the goods you wanted, at the time and place you wanted, in the correct quality and at the agreed price, you hold on to that relationship. Once they leave you have to go back to fine tooth comb quality control, asking every day on the status of the delivery, and going ballistic when someone inevitably messes something up. It is very, very uncommon for a foreigner to make a great success of a business here without a Chinese business partner but that business partner is their wife a large majority of the time.

The Party is a large part of the difference in culture. Taiwanese and Singaporeans are Chinese but they didn’t have the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward to deal with. Communism does bad things to cultures. I’m sure things will get better in time but I doubt it will be the work of just one generation.