Attitude to Time
The value of time and the importance of timeliness varies across cultures and, as a guest in any foreign country, you might reasonably be expected to accommodate these differences, at least to a certain extent.
In China, a relatively brief period of industrialisation (commencing within the last 50+ years), combined with post-revolutionary norms that often prioritised political objectives over anything else, did not encourage a culture of efficiency – or the good business practices and well-organised workplaces that would flow from such a culture.
As a result, the Chinese notion of the value of time can be very different to that of a Western businessperson, for whom wasting time is generally the equivalent of wasting money.