I've lived and done a fair amount of business there. The car thing is true. I would say people there care a lot more about their immediate network of friends / family and a lot less about anyone else. It's very safe to live there, but at the same time everyone's trying to take advantage of everyone else - literal and metaphorical pickpockets are everywhere.

The inherent lack of trust makes workplace environments really difficult. Everyone's looking out for number one (themselves), to the point of damaging their own company for personal gain. You have no clue how hard it is to build a software dev team when ANY of the developers will happily copy the source code they have access to onto a thumbdrive and sell it to your top competitor for a modest payday. I highly respect anyone who builds a software team successfully in China, such a headache.

Frankly, the internet censorship was the deal breaker for me. No Google, gmail, facebook, twitter, news, etc, is just too much to bear.

But the food was really good, good weather and foreigners are treated like minor celebrities (everyone is really really friendly), so we don't experience real China like everyone else.