Mainland China might be the home to the largest number of self-styled entrepreneurs in the world; however, as companies gain in size and influence government’s requirement to have a piece of the action tends to create a gravity-well of leadership that spoils corporate plans for penetration into global markets. The Dragonomics blog has an excellent case study of TCL, once one of the largest TV manufacturers in the world, whose acquisitions of TV makers in Europe and America went badly wrong. TCL has not only had to shrink from the international stage, but it’s misreading of the flat panel TV market as well as government diktat have left it a shrunken image of its past self. The article analyzes the four vectors of the trajectory of companies with government involvement and how China will be hard put in future to create truly private, world-beating multinationals.