The title is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the I Love New York T-shirts. “It’s because Beijing is like New York in that it’s an international city,” says Ribbons, who also directs the play. “There’s a huge expat community and, like the immigrants in New York, they’ve had a big impact on Beijing. Without the expats, there’d be no Sanlitun bar area or Dashanzi art district.”

There are no official figures on the number of foreigners living permanently on the mainland, but estimates are as high as 300,000. With most concentrated in Beijing, Shanghai and the Guangzhou/Shenzhen corridor, it’s no surprise that their influence goes beyond  the workplace. But I Heart Beijing spares neither Chinese nor westerners as it skewers characters that will be familiar to anyone who lives in Beijing or Shanghai.

“It was inspired by my life and that of my friends. There’s nothing  in the play that’s made up,” says Ribbons. There’s a romance between Sylvia and a Chinese man that’s being undermined by their inability to compromise; a traditional Chinese girl caught between her family  and her desire for western-style freedoms; a Chinabounder-like womaniser; and an ABC (American-born Chinese) who doesn’t know where she fits in Beijing.

At times, the play is intentionally provocative. “At one of the previews a Chinese guy walked out. He told me later he had to; otherwise, he’d have thrown his shoe at me,”  says Ribbons, a fluent Putonghua-speaker who’s lived in Beijing since 2003. “But it’s a satire and it makes fun of everyone. Actually, westerners come off worse than the Chinese.”

It’s surprising that it’s taken so long for a foreigner to come up  with a concept like I Heart Beijing. Mainland filmmakers and writers have already tackled the subject  of Chinese struggling to adapt to western culture abroad. Feng Xiaogang’s 1998 hit movie Be There or Be Square was the comic tale of two Chinese immigrants adrift amid the palm trees, freeways  and weirdness of Los Angeles. The Orange Prize short-listed novel by Guo Xiaolu, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, chronicles a Chinese student’s struggles with food and climate in London and her romance with a non-committal Englishman.

Whether portrayed on film, in a play or novel, or described in the growing library of guides to doing business in China, it’s the different ways westerners and Chinese communicate that catches everyone out. Although there are now 40 million people around the world learning Putonghua – a number projected to rise to 100 million by 2010, according to the Ministry  of Education – and hundreds of millions of Chinese learning English, language skills go only so far in bridging the cultural divide.

“Communication styles are more subtle here and decisions are made with others in mind,” says Kent Kedl, a Shanghai-based consultant who advises western companies how to market themselves on the mainland. “Everything has to be referred to someone else. There’s no one guy  in the traditional leadership role we have in the west to say `Yes’ or `No’.”

Despite having lived on the mainland for 22 years, Kedl doesn’t believe westerners and Chinese can ever fully understand each other. “Actually, the longer I live here the less I understand China. But full understanding is a misnomer. It’s a goal you can’t reach. The question  is, `Can you work together?’ and the answer to that is, `Yes’.”

Foreign-born Chinese struggle with mainland attitudes to work too. “It’s not about east versus west, it’s about a market economy versus  a planned economy,” says Joyce Chang, an American working  as a hospital administrator in Beijing. “ABCs are much more individualistic than mainland Chinese because the US is a developed capitalist country that forces you to be opportunist and ambitious. Here, they promote stability and harmony.”

Face remains a concept that many westerners find hard to deal with in the work environment. “The Chinese have a problem with saying they’ve made a mistake. It’s a loss of face and that makes life difficult. It’s the opposite of every management principle we’re taught in the west. It just doesn’t fit in with the way I’ve been trained,” says Chang.

On the other hand, many locals working in foreign companies feel they’re being exploited. A key  scene in I Heart Beijing features a monologue by Ting Ting about how she’s given the most boring jobs and works long hours for half the pay of her western co-workers.

If co-operating in the workplace is problematic, then social situations can be a minefield. Differing attitudes to life and romance mean expectations can be vastly different. “China is a developing country and so we’re still students in a way and from that perspective, I do think it’s hard for foreigners and Chinese to have an equal relationship,” says Liu Xiaolu, a 27-year-old Beijing teacher who plays Ting Ting.

When she was cast in the play, her parents warned her against getting too close to the western actors. “They said I shouldn’t lose my own identity by joining them in everything.”

The behaviour of some western men on the mainland does nothing to lessen locals’ distrust. “Among  the older generation, there’s still  a perception that foreigners are people with loose morals,” says  Zoe Chen, a film producer from Shanghai who’s married to an Englishman. “My parents are very liberal and never interfered when I started going out with my husband. But I know that lots of families in Shanghai wouldn’t want their daughter to be with a foreigner.”

Chen says a three-year stint  in Britain, where she worked for Channel 4, helped cure her of youthful idealism about the west. “When you’re young and see western countries on TV, you think they’re fantastic. But I realised that, while they’re different, they’re not perfect,” she says. “More Chinese realise that.”

For Ribbons, confounding  the preconceptions Chinese and westerners have about each other was the motivation for writing I Heart Beijing. “The point of the  play is to poke fun at these issues and then maybe that can start a dialogue,” she says. “Humour is the best way to do that. It’s much better than getting angry with each other.”

I Heart Beijing, Beijing City International School Theatre,  Jun 8-10, Jun 15-17, 7.30pm, 100 yuan. Inquiries: www.iheartbeijing.com