In this special episode, we sat down with two guests. Dr. Anders Corr, publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, delves into two of his exclusive articles. One reveals just how much money U.S. investors have poured into China since 1992—a whopping $2.3 trillion. He sheds light on the moral and ethical concerns around that.
Corr said, “The more that this data is coming out, actually, the more Wall Street is questioning, I believe, some of their investments, and whether these investments can keep going without crashing. Just this last week, the Shanghai stock index has dropped over 6 percent, which is a really big drop. I think that the investors are getting very jittery about China at this point. They’re a bit worried because of that drop—this week’s drop—and you actually do see in the news quite a bit. Now, some concerns … because the government can take your investments in two seconds. And we’ve seen that, that the Chinese Communist Party has no qualms about taking DiDi apart, taking Jack Ma apart, and financial Alibaba. These companies are small companies to that. They’re little ants to be squished for the Chinese Communist Party, they [the CCP] really don’t care. If you’re a billionaire, or a multimillionaire, they will take your money if they can, or if they deem that it’s good for the Party.”
In his second piece, Corr expands on his exclusive interview with former director of the National Trade Council in the Trump administration Peter Navarro and the role of tariffs on China.
Corr noted, “So we really need to think, as a country, about reshoring some of our industries back into the United States. And this is something that Peter Navarro, of course, the economist under Trump was promoting. He was promoting this idea of economic security is national security … President Biden is not entirely getting rid of Trump’s tariffs, which is on China, which is a very good thing. We need some tariffs in place, both to punish China and to try to encourage China to do what’s right and to change course away from attempting to be this global hegemony. But we also need those tariffs to protect some of our most important strategic industries like steel, aluminum, PPE, ventilators, whatever you need, even chip manufacturers, computer chip manufacturers. We need to bring some of that back and make sure that we are self reliant on the most important strategic goods.”
Also joining us is Fergus Hodgson, director at Econ Americas. He gives his take on the Cuba protests against communism.
Hodgson said, “So the problem is not the sanctions, so the embargo, which has been in place for more than half a century. The problem is a communist economy or Soviet economy that has no productivity, where one cannot afford to buy anything. If they actually produced anything, they could trade with every country in the planet except Israel and the United States. And so there’s a great open door for them to engage in trade. The embargo has simply been a scapegoat for the regime. The embargo was deserved. They confiscated private property, private industry, and therefore there were sanctions put on them. … The fact is they will not grow unless they liberalize the economy, and the regime does not want to do that. And right now, the middle class in Cuba is really people who have left to go to Miami, and those who are enjoying the remittances sent to them.”
He added, “That’s why many, if not all, of the Cuban exiles are reluctant to go back, because they know whenever they go back, immediately, when you convert U.S. dollars to the pesos, you’ll be paying a commission to the regime. And whenever you go, instead of a hotel or whatever, the lion’s share of any money will go to the regime and not to the people. So this is a grave problem that any engagement accumulates the Cuban economy basically, by definition, because there are no private corporations there. There are only partnerships with the regime. And if you don’t want them to get any money … So it’s a very difficult situation. There are other ways to build pressure. Sending money directly is not really going to solve the crisis.”
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