Well I actually know people who like doing business in China, namely my parents, who own a medium sized tech company there.

There absolutely still is a difference between private and state-owned companies. There are even cases where Huawei loses government contracts to Cisco. Like you said, the water is murky in China, and the favor of Chinese government cannot just be bought by a tiny investment such as this.

There is no guarantee that just because you are a Chinese company, the government will be on your good side. At one point Alipay was almost banned due to some central bank regulation. Didi also has a competitor named Kuaidi, which for all we know can have even deeper connections with the CPC.