Confidence with a caveat

"I went to a seminar recently put on by a European company. All the senior executives spoke English and made no attempt to communicate in Chinese. I am sure if I had been in Tanzania for, say five years, I would be able to speak some Swahili," he says.

Any difficulties have to be set against a more profitable trading environment for many European companies.

The survey highlights that 32 percent of respondents said they were making substantially more profits than a year ago. In the same survey last year only 14 percent could make that claim.

De Jong from ING says China is a more profitable place to do business than Europe itself.

"The Chinese government has targeted an average annualized growth of 7 percent over the next five years, and this seems fairly conservative. This is still a lot better than what is expected in Europe."

Hartmann at AT Kearney says there is going to be no rushing back to Europe to benefit from any sort of nascent recovery there when there is real money to be made in China.

"The only economy that is really growing is the German one and they are export orientated I don't see a strong argument for anyone here to refocus on Europe."

Lu at the University of International Business and Economics, says it is now often difficult to distinguish between European and Chinese companies.

He says the reason why European companies are becoming more profitable is that they have fully integrated into one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

"A lot of European companies entered the Chinese market very early and a lot of their management staff are local Chinese. These European companies are actually now part of the Chinese economy," he says.