This discovery of bad among the good will not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the adventures of Chinese companies in other commodities and in other parts of the world.

But what seems to have happened at Yancoal cuts to the heart of the way a business is supposed to behave when it comes to dealing with minority shareholders.

According to reports from Beijing the chairman of Yancoal, Li Xiyong, has been boasting about the way he forced an Australia director off the board of Yancoal because he was “very bossy” and “always speaking up for minority shareholders”

Chinese reports of the showdown, believed to have been with an independent director of Yancoal, James Mackenzie, praised the way Li got rid of a nuisance, with a story in a local newspaper headed: Yancoal’s Australian story: learning to be the boss of foreigners.

That statement alone is cause to ring alarm bells across the business world for the way in which it draws a “them and us” comparison and the clear inference that the Chinese way is the right way and foreigners deserve to be bossed if they are not subservient – or to use a dreadful word from an earlier era: kowtow.

What seems to have happened at Yancoal is that the collapse in the coal price triggered problems at a boardroom level with the Chinese parent company, Yanzhou Coal Mining, first wanting to buy out minority shareholders, only to abandon that plan.

While it is not unusual for a company to change plans the dropping of an offer to buy-out minority shareholders meant that people owning roughly 22% of the shares in Yancoal suddenly found themselves stuck in a business that is 78% owned by a Chinese company, and not just any Chinese company, a Chinese government owned company.

Being promised a mopping-up takeover bid, and then having that bid cancelled, annoyed Yancoal’s minority shareholders and obviously annoyed one of the company’s independent directors who has the job of looking out for minorities.

But this is where the lessons of doing business the Chinese way become a little messy, because the Chinese way seems to be that the majority always comes first and the little people always come last.

That attitude might be explained by the need to run a country with 1.1 billion people with an iron fist, never tolerating dissent from noisy minorities.

Or, as Li is reported to have said about the independent director he shoved out of the way: “He always spoke up for the small shareholders and didn’t consider the position of the major shareholder”

That comment alone should be enough to send every investor in the world thinking carefully about buying shares in a Chinese controlled business.

It should also be enough for Australian corporate regulators to fire off a ‘please explain’ note to Yancoal asking whether its board is acting in the best interests of all shareholders, or just the Chinese parent.

Whether anyone at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission can be bothered making such an inquiry is an interesting question in itself because it probably knows it will get nowhere with Yancoal, or Yanzhou.

What’s happened at Yancoal is more than an unpleasant reminder of a big investor treating smaller investors with contempt.

It is reminder that China has a lot to learn about dealing with the outside world.

The country might enjoy weight of numbers, and might have a track record of success on home turf, but its record elsewhere is poor, verging on disastrous.

The Yancoal investment itself is a case study of poor timing and falling values, though that’s nothing alongside China’s adventures in Australian iron ore where more than $10 billion has been wasted on attempts to turn low-grade ore into high-grade export product.

Sino Iron and Karara are the two iron ore projects where China has exposed the weakness in its management systems with head office making demands that cannot be met by the locals.

The Yancoal situation is a variation of the problem caused by a system based on central command and an absolute belief that what’s good for the majority must also be good for the minority, whether the minority likes it or not.

Unfortunately, no-one in China will consider what’s happened at Yancoal as being a bad thing – quite the opposite, because steamrolling minority voices is an old and very objectionable Chinese habit.

All that people thinking of investing in a Chinese-controlled company can learn from Yancoal is this simple lesson: don’t.