China Fines Toyota For Commercial Bribery?

Can someone please explain to me how offering incentives to use a financial service is bad?

Remember China is really just starting to grasp commercialism so concepts such as commissions and incentives are still sketchy.

Right now the two countries are battling it out over a fishing boat that collided with Japanese coast guard ships. This is causing a lot of friction between the two.

Agent009, its not really a Japanese Chinese spat about a fishing boat.
Its about who controls South China Sea. China has made it clear that it considers the ENTIRE South China sea its domain . Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam etc. think otherwise. Japanese SDF are nothing but a proxy force of the US.
Pushing the fishing boat that clearly was sent by the PLA to probe this issue is what is considered necessary to prevent the Eastern seaboard of Asia from being an Chinese only arena.
The strategic point of this exercise is to preempt the blue navy capacity of the US to ensure that its force projection capacity (US Carriers) are stationed no closer than Guam.
Which in turn makes the Japanese protectorate agreement with the US moot or based on a much flimsier reality and less can be said about Taiwan.

Well, the State Dept has essentially bowed out on this one, calling "South and East Asia areas of Chinese influence."
Simply put, Obama isnt willing to challenge China yet or the Islamic right in Afghanistan, rather its been his policy to appease and listen.
Japan / Vietnam / taiwan know that they will have to make peace with the new power at hand , China as the potential cost of any dispute involving the US approaches an Pyrrhic outcome. Will the US be willing to bet a large number of troops and casualties for Taiwan and Japan ? China is betting the answer is NO.

There is a legal difference between a bribe and an incentive.

In this case, the charge is that Toyota was paying the dealers a fee to get buyers to use a Toyota loan instead of a commercial bank loan - the fee was unknown to the buyer AND at a dis-service to the buyer. In most places, this is illegal. Why? Ultimately, the buyer got ripped off.

However, let's re-structure the deal where the fee is disclosed AND it is in the best interest of the buyer, and now its an incentive, not a bribe (Remember all of those $2,000 factory to dealer incentives come to memory, yes? Perfectly legal).

Full disclosure and who benefits makes all of the difference.