China Vs Usa Essay

anshThe panda has two faces
Doing business in China is no stroll in the people's park--and never will be GOOGLE and Rio Tinto are the chalk and cheese of the business world: the former a bits-and-bites wunderkind born in 1998, the latter a grizzled mining company that has been around since 1873. But over the past few months they have both found themselves in trouble with the Chinese authorities. To avoid censorship, Google has closed its Chinese search engine and diverted traffic from the country to its site in Hong Kong. Rio Tinto has seen four of its employees sentenced to lengthy prison terms for taking bribes from Chinese firms. Google and Rio are only the most recent of a long line of Western companies to have been bruised by China. Unilever suffered for years because it was forced into shotgun marriages with unsatisfactory Chinese partners. The government has prevented Coca-Cola from buying a local juice-maker out of seemingly spurious concerns about competition. A recent survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in China found that a high proportion of American firms doing business in the country feel that they are the victims of discriminatory or inconsistent treatment. The most obvious reason for this is that the ruling Communist Party is a nightmare to deal with--all smiles one moment and snarls the next. The party has been wooing foreign investors for decades with access to cheap labour and a huge market, not to mention fancy office parks and world-class infrastructure: since the mid-1990s Shanghai has built a second international airport, a new subway, inner and outer ring roads, two elevated freeways and a light-rail system. But at the same time the Chinese want their pound of flesh. The party regards foreign investment as a mechanism for acquiring foreign know-how rather than just jobs and capital; hence the insistence on joint ventures. It also regards economic growth as a tool for entrenching its own power; hence the application of the iron fist...