I know this post was written way longgg ago, but felt compelled to respond (thought I’m thinking my comments will just drop soundlessly into the abyss).

I’m a bicultural, bilingual Chinese Canadian who’s grown up in Canada since the age of 4 and has been living in China since 2004,

I think our frustrations with China occur, because we judge China based on the set of rules and ethics we learned in the countries where we grew up.

Perhaps we were fortunate enough to grow up in a free and democratic country, which didn’t have a centralized government breathing down our backs, telling us where to live, what to do for a living and how high to jump.

Perhaps we grew up in a multicultural neighborhood or went to school with children of different cultures.

And maybe our families were even well-off enough that we didn’t have to quit school in junior high, so that we could find a job to support our parents.

It’s also a fact that China’s economic development is far outpacing its social and spiritual growth – something which is going to come back and haunt China in future generations. And the income disparity between classes has gone from a gap to an irreparable chasm.

It’s also amazing that China has literally dragged itself off the ground from the devastation left by Mao, less than a century ago, and has become the powerhouse it is today.

So, when you look at the schizophrenic chain of events that China’s gone through to get to where it is today, I think you’re going to find some pretty insecure/overly nationalist Chinese citizens and a government that is still intent on wielding authoritarian power, but also realizes the huge role that foreign investment has in China to make it what it is today.

I’m not making any excuses for what you, or other foreigners in China are experiencing – I sometimes get discriminated against and ripped off too – but I think all of us living and working in China for whatever reason has to realize that we are in a foreign country that is not our own, and we cannot expect it to be our own.

And we cannot expect China to make the Great Leap Forward to a mindset that is on par with the “West” right now, today, because China is a communist country, closed off to the rest of the world till only recently and still in a very restricted way.

I think a lot of foreigners come to China and see all the infrastructure and glitz and get lulled into thinking it’s all hunky dory and just like “back home”.

Well, it’s not. And it’s not going to change any time soon. So, all that can be changed is our own mindset and the way we perceive China.

By the way, the argument “yea, well you did it first” is really just as ineffective for adults to use as it is for children.

As for the involvement of foreign companies in China, I personally believe them to be subject to a tighter set of checks and balances than local companies due to having less influence over the local government and being, on average, larger scale operations. This does not mean that things which are quite wrong are not being done by foreign companies in China. I will always remember the words of a man I knew who had worked as a contractor for BASF in Nanjing and had spoken of them flushing whole vats full of poisonous material into the Yangzi river when it was discovered that they had mixed wrong. Sure, this is only one incident, but from what I am told it is demonstrative of wider practices among many companies operating in China.

I have lived through multiple politically controlled “burns” here in China and, again, justified or not, right or wrong, is not the question for any of them. The reality is that nationalism is used as a tool and few people (Americans included) realize how often they are being played, I think.

I really have to say I disagree here with your investment comparison. To compare private/corporate investment dollars from the West into China to Sinopec or other Chinse government controlled/owned investments in Africa is at best not at all accurate and worst deliberately misleading.