Payment - the Chinese Way

The Chinese Way is threatening to become a major series on here, I know. I will try to contain my curmudge, but... there's just been an awful lot of This is China! weird shit happening to me just lately.

The latest instalment...

One of the academic publishers I work for just paid me for a couple of articles. I queried why they had apparently still not paid me for one of the ones I'd edited for them three months or so back (originally, I'd been told that this was intended for a different journal, with a later publication date, and so I wouldn't be paid for it for about three months - this now appears to have been a complete lie).  My contact there went ominously silent on me for a while. Then she confessed that - owing to some strange botch-up by their accountants, nothing at all to do with her - it appeared that this fee had been paid to another of their foreign editors.

Straightforward solution, anywhere else in the world: authorise a new payment to be made to me; reclaim the inadvertent payment to the other editor via a deduction from their next set of fees.

The Chinese Way: ask the other editor to pay me the money.... and give them my bank account details so they can do that without asking me first.

I am absolutely LIVID, and am in danger of blowing another long-term job out of the water with an effusion of scornful complaint. (They don't take criticism well, the Chinese; they sulk and pout and convince themselves it was really your fault; and decide they don't need the hassle of working with someone who states their opinions honestly...)

The fires of my wrath were further stoked by the fact that my contact - a young woman who acts as a sort of supervising editor - attempted to pacify me by explaining that it is "perfectly normal in China" to give away people's private bank account information to third parties without their consent.

Unfortunately, I fear, what this equates to is that bad manners, lack of common sense, and crass incompetence are perfectly normal in China.