Maintaining friends in the Party, often Party Members inside your HR department and inside the board of your Chinese corporate division, means rolling over on their priorities a carefully considered percentage of the time. What that percentage is depends on context, but the whole structure of corporate life allows the Party to lean on the scale of decisionmaking as necessary to pursue national priorities. In most issues, in most areas, they aren't going to try to intervene because it doesn't benefit the Party to micromanage.

This works for Chinese businesses pretty well.

The problem for Western businesses is that "Creating domestic competition to any Western business with a comparative advantage which becomes too important to China" is always, on some level, a national priority.

My favorite Party explainer - https://chovanec.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/primer-on-chinas-l...