> it's the US companies fault that they can't be innovative enough to figure out the Chinese market Western business failures in China are more attributable to

> it's the US companies fault that they can't be innovative enough to figure out the Chinese market Western business failures in China are more attributable to a lack of understanding of the business culture and excessive regulatory barriers and oversight applied on foreign companies than any innate superiority. Negotiating business deals in China requires an extensive understanding of the culture to approach it properly, whereas Western negotiations are hinged mostly around profits and liabilities. Things like face/reputation, the unstated but expected mutual bribes/gifts (direct and to family/authority figures) and networking are new to them, and they stumble through it, giving the appearance of incompetence. China is pretty hostile to wholly-foreign companies, too, which means western companies are stuck wasting time hunting for local partners and making these deals instead of just selling products and services. Not only that, but even after negotiations have been sealed, there's other cultural differences that get overlooked. This can be seen in the dozens of stories where a Chinese exec/partner resold business secrets, or stole clients and relaunched a competing service. It's obvious there's some sort of disconnect in the communications and expectations. Western companies are used to contracts having a lot more value. Don't get me wrong, some amazing things happen in China. Shenzhen is beyond impressive. But given the large cultural differences and how hostile the government is to foreign-operated business, it's rather glib and disingenuous to claim that the US companies can't "figure out" the Chinese market. The "market" is just buying and selling, but the part that's causing problems are the government's artificial limitations on the market. The foreign companies aren't allowed to ship their existing products as is, and through the process of certification, the idea is often stolen and reimplemented. The Chinese government isn't really interested in fixing this, as it's more advantageous for them to have local businesses than foreign businesses. It'd be one thing if a foreigner opened up a store and nobody ever bought anything, but half of the failures are taking place before product launch with staff and partnership meltdowns. The Chinese "market" itself suffers deeply from government manipulation. Plenty of citizens mock their government's obnoxious nanny attitude with slang like "river crab" and high VPN use. Government corruption is a common complaint, and many of the richer populace got rich through excessive greed and collusion in the initial privatization of business. There's still the overly nationalistic people who believe the propaganda and descend on foreign news like locusts in their eagerness to devour the criticism, but there are plenty more who don't. It's not like the west is inherently better or anything. We're all having problems with business regulation.