Business | Spooked

Is doing business in China becoming impossible for foreigners?

Selective enforcement of draconian data and spying laws is scaring Western companies

Image: Ryan Chapman
|Shanghai

JUDGING PURELY by the steady stream of Western executives crossing the Pacific, China is picking up where it left off before the onset of covid-19. In the past couple of weeks Elon Musk of Tesla, an electric-car maker, met officials in Beijing on his first trip to the country in more than three years. At the same time Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, America’s biggest bank, was hosting a conference in Shanghai that brought together more than 2,500 clients from around the world. Hundreds of business bigwigs have made similar trips in the past three months. President Xi Jinping’s top officials have been greeting them with the mantra that, after a pandemic hiatus, “China is back in business.”

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Spooked”

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