ARTICLE: "Concerns About China Arbitration Rise," by Ashby Jones and Andrew Batson, Wall Street Journal, 9 May 2008, p. B1.

Chinese ape rising global use of private arbitrators to settle business disputes (just like in family law in U.S.), but seem to deliver a fairly biased stream of judgments in favor of Chinese companies vs. foreign ones. Instead of reducing biz cost and uncertaintly, the longer they pursue this line, the more foreign companies will reconsider the real "costs" of doing business there. You can use market power to force a localized business rule set, but the longer you do it, the less attractive you make yourself in a network trade world, referring to the two-thirds of globalization's trade that's controlled by multinationals (with half being true network, or intra-corporate trade). By that I mean you just seem like a riskier node. The ways companies hedge on this typically is called the "China plus one" strategy of locating X facilities in China but always backing one up elsewhere in SE Asia (increasingly Vietnam). The more China pretends it will have its own way of conducting business, the more hedging we'll see by multinationals.