Or do Chinese people just not eat any cheese?
Cheese is becoming more popular in China due to western influence. It’s not big in traditional Japanese cuisine either. Maybe historically both didn’t have much success or drive to keep domesticated cattle. The Wikipedia article on lactose intolerance also shows very high rates for these general ethnic groups. Starting all the way from keeping a cow, cheese is work. You’re not very likely to put in all the effort if you can’t stomach the final product, I bet.
I’ve had a couple of Schezuan dishes that contained little chunks of paneer.
Other than that… got nuthin’, and being in Vancouver I’ve spent a few decades sampling more varieties of Chinese cuisine than I’d care to try to enumerate. 
Crab rangoon usually has cream cheese- that’s the only thing I can think of.
Crab rangoon is about as traditional Chinese as French fries.
Well, it’s not just cows that can make cheese. Though I don’t know if either country had much of the other animals that could.
No. A few weeks ago, this was discussed in Slate, about an attempt to introduce western cheese into China. Traditionally, cheese was considered a barbarian food, eaten by the Mongols; plus many Chinese are lactose-intolerant. They tend to substitute bean curd and find the taste and smell of cheese very distasteful.
I like it, but never even heard of it until I moved to SF from NJ - do they have it on the East coast?
Joe
Okay, now I’m thinking of how I could add cheese to Chinese dishes. How about broccoli beef ‘n’ cheese? Yum!
She didn’t specify traditional.
Not quite correct. In Hong Kong and elsewhere (obviously places where there’s been significant exposure to Western culture), I’ve had a dish called Cantonese Lobster (God knows what it’s called in Chinese). But that’s the only thing I’ve seen with cheese.
Oh, one other not-cheese-but-dairy exception is mayonnaise shrimp, which are simultaneously disgusting and delcious. Also I think a Cantonese/HK specialty.
What’s the dairy in it? Is it made with milk?
Condensed milk. It’s almost too cloying.
Can’t find the exact quote from Stephen Colbert, but something like:
“One of life’s mysteries is why melted cheese looks delicious on a plate of spaghetti, but looks revolting on a plate of chinese food”
That stuff is freaky ain’t it?
But I agree, once you get past the thought of it, it’s really good.
As I’ve noted before on this Board, Anthropologist Marvin Harris wrote a great book anbout which foods are eaten where, and he points out how there are no traditional Chinese dishes with any dairy content – not merely lacking cheese, but also butter, cream, or other dairy products. The appearance of ice cream in Chinese restaurants is a recent development.
It’s not by chance that a lot of Chinese people are lactose-intolerant. When I was in grad school, I invited one of the Chinese post-docs over for dinner, and he was adamant about my not sefving any dairy products. I thought at the time that it was a personal dietary quirk. I’ve since learned better.
The issue of why people eat what they eat is a complex one. Not everyone in China or with Chinese ancestry is lactose intolerant, but enougfh of them are to make the ban on Chinese dairy products pretty universal. Which raises the issue of why so many of them are lactosr intolerant when the Indians (who aren’t all that far away) and Tobetans rely on butter in their diets. Read Harris’ book Good to Eat (alsp published as The Sacrede Cow and the Abominable Pig).
Much closer to home, the Mongols are big butter fans (the buttered salted tea is, um, an acquired taste – but so is mutton).
Indians use clarified butter which has liitle or no lactose, and yoghurt which has less lactose than milk. They also use paneer, curdled cheese, which also has much less lactose than milk. Tibetans may use more goat and sheep milk products which are also lower in lactose.
Shucks, you can get 'em in a Chinese restaurant easy as buy little premade ones from the frozen section of the local supermarket here in Virginia.
Regardless, Indians are mostly lactose tolerant, and can eat dairy products without consequence. VChinese are very heavily lactose intolerant: