An American lawyer in Beijing, Timothy Gelatt, met with Chinese officials earlier this month to discuss the taxes on a joint venture involving one of his U.S. clients. As the conversation progressed, an official suddenly - produced a document Gelatt had never seen. "I said, 'Oh, what's that?' " he recalls. The document was a ruling directly related to the taxing of joint ventures, but it had never been published openly. To foreign attorneys and many Chinese as well, the incident was typical. Says Gelatt: "We are constantly finding out by accident things that are relevant to what we're doing."
China's...