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Amway China’s chairwoman, Eva Cheng, started at the company as a secretary in the Hong Kong office in 1977 and now oversees the company’s operations in Greater China and Southeast Asia, which was reportedly responsible for more than one third of its $8.4 billion in 2009 revenue. A decade ago direct marketing was banned in China for seven years, severely affecting Amway’s ability to operate in the country. NEWSWEEK’s Isaac Stone Fish talked to Cheng about the business climate in China today, the best way to deal with Beijing, and the role of women in China’s corporate culture. Excerpts:

There’s been a lot of press lately about China not being an easy place to work for foreign companies. How does Amway feel about the current business climate in China?

Even though it’s modern, dynamic, very developed in many respects, China as a whole is still a developing country; it has never really been a very easy place to do business.

Amway had a lot of problems in 1998 because of government fear of cults and Falun Gong. What have you done to convince the Chinese government that Amway is not a breeding ground for cults, and do you feel that sort of suspicion is a problem going forward?

I think that kind of suspicion was around when the government did not have a very thorough understanding of the history of this industry around the world. The No. 1 task was communication: give the government the basic knowledge of differentiating between fraudulent pyramid companies and ethical, legitimate direct-selling companies. Another thing we did at that time was increase our transparency. In China in all the major cities we agreed to set up shop, a physical presence. We do everything we can to let the government know that we’re totally transparent to them, and that what we do is no different from any of the other major multinationals they know about in the country.