[seanmcdirmid]

Kind of sort of? American companies heavily use local talent, or people from Taiwan, often Chinese expats with American citizenship. The government could still apply pressure to family, I guess, but in general the publicity alone is enough to make sure they don’t interfere much. Likewise, American branches want as good relationship with the government as they can get, which tends to temper their actions.

Working in China for 10 years, I can’t say that I didn’t feel the party at all, but their influence in our work was pretty much nil. They mostly interfered in the distribution of benefits and such.

[eznoonze]

It depends on whether the party considers your business useful to their rule or helpful in implementing their policies. For example, Wechat, Alipay, etc are all very useful.

Their policy is trickling down gradually.

They recently inserted Commissars into a list of Hong Kong real estate companies. So even non-mainland chinese companies are not immune.

[seanmcdirmid]

Commissars or just trade union representatives? If the latter, Microsoft China had that also, but it didn’t have much of an influence on the company. Commissars would be really strange since that is a role in the PLA.

[eznoonze]

Board of Director. The title of course is not called "Commissar", but they serve as a defacto one.

Some are public. Some hide their identities (but serve similar purpose). Secret ones usually are used in dealing with foreign entities (i.e. non-mainland). So you may not even know there is one except if you are in the top management.