Late last month, executives from more than a dozen top European companies in China met in Beijing to discuss their concerns about the growing role of the ruling Communist Party in the local operations of foreign firms, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions. President Xi Jinping's efforts to strengthen the party's role throughout Chinese society have reached the China operations of foreign companies, and executives at some of those entities don't like the resulting demands they are facing. The presence of party units has long been a fact of doing business in China, where party organizations exist in nearly 70 percent of some 1.86 million privately owned companies, the official China Daily reported last month.
