The words “China” and “ownership” do not sit particularly well together in my mind.
Because what exactly are your possibilities on the day the regime decides that you are no longer a valued guest?
In the United States, and indeed in most Western countries, you have something that is easy to take for granted until it disappears: the rule of law.
You have courts. You have lawyers. You have contractual rights. You have a legal system through which you can attempt to enforce those rights when somebody decides that your interests are inconvenient.
It is not perfect. It can be painfully slow. It can be extraordinarily expensive. And anyone who has spent enough time dealing with lawyers will know that “justice” and “affordable” are not necessarily natural companions.
But the tools exist.
If you use them properly, they can help you defend what is yours.
That distinction matters enormously.
Because in China, the relationship between ownership and political power is fundamentally different. When the state decides that you are no longer welcome, the question is not simply whether you possess a contract saying that something belongs to you.
The question is whether the system will continue to recognise that claim when recognising it becomes politically inconvenient.
About ten years ago, I was asked by a client whether I could help one of his partners extricate himself from an investment in China.
I told them I was probably the wrong person to ask.
I am not a China expert. I do not speak the language, and I had no particular familiarity with the Chinese legal and political system. My professional experience is concentrated elsewhere — particularly Africa and the Middle East — and I knew enough to understand the limits of what I did not know.
But I also had a fairly simple suspicion.
If the regime in China decided that the investor was no longer a valued guest, there might not be very much anyone could do about it.
The investment could be lost.
The intellectual property could be lost.
And the contractual rights that looked perfectly respectable on paper might turn out to be worth considerably less than the paper they were printed on.
That, eventually, is more or less what happened.
This is the part of doing business in China that is frequently obscured by spreadsheets, market forecasts and discussions about manufacturing costs.
People talk about ownership as though it were a binary condition.
You own something, or you do not.
But ownership is only as meaningful as your ability to enforce it.
A piece of paper does not protect an asset. A functioning legal system does.
And a legal system ultimately depends on whether the institutions enforcing the law are sufficiently independent of the political power that controls the country.
That is where the difference becomes rather stark.
I can have considerable disagreements with Western governments. At times, I can have serious ones. I can distrust politicians, dislike regulations and question the wisdom of decisions made by governments on both sides of the Atlantic.
But there is a hierarchy of problems.
A government making a decision I dislike is one thing.
A government having the power to decide whether my property rights exist in the first place is something else entirely.
Compared with that, the frustrations of Western government begin to look almost luxurious.
The rule of law may be imperfect.
But imperfect rule of law is still vastly preferable to perfect obedience to the state.
And when the day comes that you are no longer a valued guest, that difference is no longer theoretical.