Having gone through the process somewhat myself there's 3 ways you do business in China from a structure point of view (IANAL, see the China Law Blog for more accurate and up to date info):<p>- Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise:  This is a Chinese LLC with foreign shareholders.  All management and IP reside within the Chinese entity (or are licensed to).  Management operates under Chinese laws and there are restrictions on how many Z Visas they'll give you to bring in foreign workers.<p>- Registered Office:  This is just basically an outpost within China.  It is quite limited in what it can do, notably it may not bill Chinese companies for services or products offered.  Thus you can't sell anything from it.  Interestingly here they tax you in China based on your Chinese expenses (since you have no revenue).<p>- Joint Venture:  This is when you team up with a Chinese company and create a new company that has local management and IP which then engages the Chinese market.<p>As you can see your options for doing business within China are pretty restricted and pretty much always puts you at the mercy of the Chinese.