Vanguard, a global investment giant, has made a decisive move to withdraw from China by finalizing severance agreements with its remaining Shanghai staff, including country head Luo Dengpan. This exit follows a series of disputes, and China’s retaliatory measures, such as exit bans, raids, and arrests of foreigners, raise concerns about its investment climate.
Vanguard has taken the final step to exit China, signing severance agreements with the remaining staff of about 10 people in Shanghai, including country head Luo Dengpan, per Bloomberg.
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) November 6, 2023
- While US security moves only target and affect Chinese investments and trade, China’s responses are rattling investors around the world
- For a start, Beijing must tamp down its high-profile anti-espionage campaign and review its exit ban – which investors find chilling
China’s President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Joe Biden look set to meet in San Francisco later this month. They will no doubt focus on the Taiwan issue, the most significant challenge to a stable US-China relationship, but how to manage the “securitisation” of the bilateral economic relationship should also be a priority.
Beijing has accused Washington of playing up concerns about the security implications of their economic ties since 2018, when the Trump administration launched the trade war. Biden’s administration has escalated it into a chip war aimed at stifling China’s progress in cutting-edge technologies.
To Beijing, Washington appears to “securitise” almost every aspect of economic ties, from trade and technology to investment, in the name of national security. TikTok, a short-video sharing platform, is under closer scrutiny because of its Chinese ownership, and security concerns have even been raised about Chinese-made electric buses running in US cities.
Painting itself as the wronged party, Beijing maintains the US is solely to blame for everything that has gone wrong in the relationship.
Lawmakers are calling on the Biden administration to limit China’s access to a budding technology used to design semiconductor chips, known as RISC-V, per Bloomberg.
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) November 6, 2023