ABSTRACT
China has placed a high priority on telecommunications in the 1990s and seeks to create an ‘information society’. There is however a legal and practical dysfunctionalism between the long-term investment strategies of the foreign investors in the telecommunications industry and the interests of the Chinese government.
Western insistence on transparency contrasts with the Chinese government’s use of secret or neibu regulations as part of China’s legal system inaccessible to both the foreign investor and non-government Chinese. Can there be a convergence of the two different styles of legal systems and business cultures? This chapter further contrasts the private law regimes of Western business dependent on their belief in a civil society, and the lack of recognition of a private law regime in the China of the 1990s.
The expectations of the foreign investor who comes from the traditions of a civil society cannot be met by the Chinese partner whose ‘mother-in-law’ in government plays a disproportionate role in business philosophy in terms of access to information and changing the rules.
