I live in China but I am an American. My business partner and I intentionally decided not to pursue business here, instead focusing on an outsourcing model. The

I live in China but I am an American. My business partner and I intentionally decided not to pursue business here, instead focusing on an outsourcing model. The most obvious reasons are culture and language (I'm referring to the culture and language of your typical customer), but, at least for China, these aren't the biggest reasons. The biggest reason is government/law. China likes to talk a lot about the rule of law but the rules are ambiguous and not everyone plays by the same rules. A lot of business here is ruled by who you know and how much back-scratching you can do. Even if we (my partner and I) were able to accurately understand language (we're coming close) and culture (this still needs more work), we would be at a huge disadvantage. I am not so naïve to think that corruption doesn't exist elsewhere, but in China it is systemic. I know college grads who talked about paying someone for a job, the idea being that they will eventually make more money than they paid for the job. Thus the job isn't necessarily given to the highest qualified (or even baseline qualified) applicant, but rather to the person who can provide the greatest amount of financial gain for the gate keeper. This type of thinking is pervasive everywhere in society: your future customer will think like this too... which is why it's so hard to sell software here. I don't have a problem with developing 关系 (relationships) with others. That's part of the recipe for any type of business transaction; having a good relationship with your clients/service providers just makes life better. But in China, it seems, even from my lowly perspective that the demands from this kind of game are extremely high. This is a cultural/language issue in itself, but it's for the business side. The culture/language problem in relating to potential customers is very high, but even if that issue gets solved, the disadvantage that a Western (i.e. American/European) business faces in terms of understanding the business culture is so high that it seems very risky to try to enter the market here.