This article also doesn't touch on the simple technical pains of having to work across the Great Firewall and the effects of it their ability to do business outside of China. Even when you have an excellent partner in China (or vice-versa), so much of the back and forth ends up coming down to issues going across the firewall. Your collaboration tools don't work, so you're split across Slack and WeChat. Github is a disaster in China, and of course, the Googs isn't something you can require anyone in China use. Usual day-to-day stuff is neither simple nor reliable when you have to cross that firewall.

And too boot, it's amazing that Chinese companies are still doing a really poor job of figuring out how to connect well to the outside world. They'll turn to you asking why your API/whatever isn't working for their developers, and then expect that you have some miracle solution to get rid of the 200-400ms of latency (each way!) across the firewall, as well as a cure for the hours of it just dropping all traffic. Perhaps the Party has scared them enough they're not willing to chance employees doing illegal things on the company's connection...

The firewall is a fickle, cantankerous beast that, to me, is really at heart of this matter. Because they want throats to choke for every packet on Chinese soil, they've created this huge barrier that touches everything you might want to do in China or with a Chinese company.