Until recently it was fair to say that if Chinese regulators wreck your best-laid business plans once, shame on them. But if it happens a second time, shame on you.

As the importance of the China market to the likes of Apple and General Motors soared after the global financial crisis, the world’s biggest multinationals struggled to staff it accordingly. For some of them, it took years to beef up crucial local functions such as government relations and due diligence. 

In such a large, fast-growing and rapidly changing market, it was easy to be tripped up by a newly aggressive competition regulator one year or by emboldened anti-corruption investigators the next. After Xi Jinping came to power in late 2013, multinationals including Daimler, GSK, Microsoft and Qualcomm were all snared. The lucky ones settled quickly and learned lessons. Qualcomm recently showed how a company could learn from its mistakes and make sure not to repeat them. But unfortunately for the San Diego-based semiconductor company, that was not enough when it became a valuable pawn in the trade war between the world’s two largest economies.