A rising number of Chinese companies in U. S. capital markets pose a risk for U. S. investors as they unwittingly finance companies associated…
A rising number of Chinese companies in U. S. capital markets pose a risk for U. S. investors as they unwittingly finance companies associated with concentration camps in China, an expert warns.
Through public pension and retirement funds, investors are transferring wealth from the United States to Chinese entities that do not comply with U. S. laws, a problem that has been overlooked for more than a decade.
“We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars and moving rapidly toward $1 trillion,” said Roger Robinson, a former member of President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council and president and CEO of RWR Advisory Group, which tracks Chinese investments worldwide.
“Now, that’s a lot of financing that’s being attracted from unwitting American investors,” he said at a May 2 event hosted by the civil advocacy group Committee on the Present Danger: China, launched this year.
According to Robinson, there are more than 650 Chinese companies traded in the U. S. stock markets. Around 86 of these entities are listed in the New York Stock Exchange and 62 in Nasdaq. And more than 500 Chinese companies are traded in the over-the-counter market, “the least regulated and the most popular for those seeking to skirt transparency and disclosure requirements,” said Robinson.
There is a wide spectrum of companies traded on the U. S stock exchanges and many of them are “outright bad actors,” he said.
After closely examining Chinese enterprises and their entire network of subsidiaries, Robinson found that some are linked to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, for example.
These companies are “national security abusers of all stripes, as well as human rights abusers,” he said, adding that they are associated with sanctions violations, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, cyber hacking, or building and militarizing the islands in the South China Sea.
And in terms of human rights, he said there are Chinese companies that provide “surveillance cameras and facial-recognition technology and the like to help maintain the incarceration of some 1 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang,” in so-called detention or concentration camps.
