Veteran Global Gainsmembers know what we love about China. There's tremendouspotential upside there, with many cheap stocksready to explode in value -- especially among smaller companies.

We can never emphasize enough, however, the dangers that lurk in the world's most populous country -- the nasty traits of some Chinese businesses that make us fear and loathe them.

An emerging giant
There are nearly 2,000 public companies in China. About 450 are listed in the U.S., with that number growing all the time. And many of them are future multibaggers that will make their shareholders rich. Look around and you'll find businesses such as Trina Solar (NYSE: TSL) and Tianyin Pharmaceutical (AMEX: TPI), which have more than doubled in just the past six months.

But we can't pretend these types of winners are easy to find. If you don't know the lay of the land -- the ins and outs of Chinese political structure -- you could quite literally lose a fortune.

Here are just three of the problems to be on the lookout for:

1. Hard-to-decipher financials. The Economistmagazine sums it up better than I can:

The financial results of companies that global investors wish to buy into can be as unintelligible as the dialect spoken in the company town. It is said (with apparent sincerity) that some Chinese firms keep several sets of books -- one for the government, one for company records, one for foreigners and one to report what is actually going on.

In fairness, this was written a couple of years ago and Chinese financials are a bit easier to understand now. And there's no doubt that American companies alsodo not make available the books we'd really like to see. And the ones we cansee aren't necessarily easy to decipher -- especially financials ranging from US Bancorp (NYSE: USB) to AIG (NYSE: AIG).

But there's little question that we simply can't get the same lucidity and transparency from Chinese companies that we do from domestic firms.

2. Questionable quality of earnings. Quality of earnings refers to the extent to which financial reporting can be trusted. The more conservative management is with its assumptions, the better we feel about the numbers it reports. A 2008 Barron'sarticle relayed a pretty sobering study from RateFinancials, an independent firm that rates financial reports. Looking at the five largest recent Chinese IPOs -- including LDK Solar and Yingli Green Energy -- RateFinancials found problems with "big increases in receivables, negative operating and free-cash flows, significant amounts of deferred revenues, major prepayments, and sizable long-term commitments to suppliers."

3. Poor corporate governance. China is "perceived to routinely engage in bribery when doing business abroad," according to Transparency International. And in TI's 2008 corruption report, the country falls well below any comfortable level, ranking 72nd. That doesn't mean every Chinese company is dicey, of course, but investors must be on guard. So while you can check Yahoo! Finance and see that U.S.-based Las Vegas Sands (NYSE: LVS), for example, has a below-average corporate governance rating in the consumer services sector, such easy tools don't exist for Chinese companies.

To sum it up, our Global Gainsteam warns that "Shareholders of Chinese companies should know that there is no real apparatus by which their interests are protected and that they are essentially betting on being on the same side as management and the majority shareholders -- who as often as not are branches of the government, the military, and/or the Communist Party."

And yet ...
Still, China's vast potential cannot be ignored, and investing indirectly through multinationals like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) won't cut it. China is a small part of these companies' businesses; to realize the greatest potential from China's growth, you'll need to look to domestic companies.

We recommend some China exposure as a part of any balanced portfolio. That's why we travel to the country yearly, and are recently back from meeting with several companies and some prominent investors. These meetings -- the ability to sit at the same table as management and see the business operations with our own eyes -- allow us to separate the good from the bad, and the quality from the corrupt. (You can see all of our notes and stock recommendations with a free trial.) Continued...