No pretence is off boundary to a Beijing this magnificently confident

Leo Lewis: Commentary & , : {}

Packing for a successful business trip to China, warn the consultants at International Risk, should be a nervous and costly affair. Take a laptop, a BlackBerry, a mobile phone and all your usual electronic clobber but make sure they are not the ones you normally use. Somewhere along the way, they will be plundered for information.

Anti-hacking experts at Trend Micro go even further: if you are staying in a hotel, shut down your machine when you take a shower that is when the Chinese cyber thieves tend to strike.

It is tempting for companies to conclude that the foreigner doing business in China struggles in an arena of permanent injustice, that the game is fundamentally rigged against success. Governments, especially Washington, believe that a range of Chinese policies from the currency peg to rare metal export quotas are the construct of an economy that cares neither for the spirit nor letter of free trade.

The arrest of the four Rio Tinto executives fitted neatly with a view that no trick is off-limits to a Beijing that, particularly since the 2008 humiliation of Wall Street, has supreme confidence that it can get away with anything.

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This is evident amid the rising acrimony over whether the Chinese currency has been kept unfairly low. President Obamas pledge to double US export growth in five years implies a clash with Chinas own export ambitions and a deeper politicisation of the currency debate.

But China now has answers to all that. A hawkish editorial response last week by the Xinhua news agency declared that America is the biggest manipulator of foreign currency and is unqualified to accuse other countries.

Fears of how China deals with foreign businesses are reflected in concerns over its projection of power around the globe especially its push into countries with mineral and energy resources. In a speech at the China Development Forum yesterday, Tom Albanese alluded to these concerns. To develop its overseas brand, China will need to reflect on the global impact of its activities, the Rio Tinto chief executive said.

The tendency to exaggerate the horrors of doing business in China may also apply at the level of the individual companies operating there. The opportunities are so good that many foreign companies choose to treat the iniquities as a cost of being near those opportunities.

A list of big foreign companies that have pulled out of the Chinese market is short and riddled with highly specific circumstances. Yahoo! and eBay pulled out of China but actually folded their operations into ventures with local players. Ahold withdrew because it could not compete with low-priced local competitors.

The annual Doing Business report by the World Bank Group a measure of the difficulties faced by domestic companies operating in their home economies places China 89th out of 183 surveyed countries. Foreign companies may take the view that corruption, the debacle with Google and the arrest of the Rio executives mean that China belongs lower down on the list, but the position suggests that even Chinese entrepreneurs know that the scene is far from perfect.

Nick Day, chief executive of the business intelligence company Diligence, said that from the foreign business point of view, the Chinese scene is clouded by Beijings own worries about social instability. Those concerns are exaggerated by the state of the global economy. Western business are not going to be targeted but are likely to be caught in the crossfire, he said.