> subsidies (both monetary and policy) from the Chinese government that make it almost impossible for foreign companies to compete against domestic companies.
You keep saying this sort of thing, but yet, all sorts of foreign companies do booming business in China. The likes of Starbucks, KFC, Volkswagen, Intel, Boeing and Airbus absolutely dominate their respective markets in China. For a long time, Apple was crushing it in China (until Chinese consumers decided the quality/price ratio was too low).
> But as to your point, some of the things that make it difficult for western countries to do business there is the great firewall, draconian privacy laws
The privacy laws you're citing were only just passed about a month ago. They can't have been a hindrance before. The Great Firewall affects every business in China, both foreign and Chinese.
> Just because there are U.S companies in China
It's not just that there are a few US businesses here or there in China. Foreign businesses have an enormous presence in China. It's the most important single market in the world for a very large number of American and European businesses. If that's what business "hell" looks like, I can only imagine how great heaven is.
> The U.S is a much bigger economy than China and that's one of the reasons why you see penetration from U.S companies in China.
It depends on how you measure the size of an economy. In purchasing power parity units, the Chinese economy is larger than the American economy. Going by the exchange rate, it's smaller. The question of which economy is larger is actually ill-defined.
However, the reason why there's greater penetration of American companies in China than vice versa is that the US economy is more developed. There are simply many more leading companies in many sectors in the US. In the late 1970s, China began courting foreign investment, which meant courting foreign companies. Far from making life "hell" for those companies, the Chinese government tried to give them attractive conditions. Many foreign companies invested large sums in China, and made enormous profits out of those investments.
Now, for the first time, Western companies are facing peer competitors from within China, and you suddenly hear cries of how China is taking advantage of everyone. The crazy thing is how all perspective is lost. The massive presence of foreign companies in the Chinese market and the massive exploitation of cheap Chinese labor by foreign corporations are forgotten, and all we hear about are how it's supposedly impossible to do business in China.