“China is hungry for investment funding – but why is Beijing unable to raise cash at home?” So asks Steven W. Mosher, a scholar whose first book about the communist-controlled region of China, Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese (1983), led to his expulsion from both Communist China and the Stanford University Ph.D. program. (Communist influence over U.S. academic institutions didn’t start yesterday.) Here is the answer to the question in the headline:
Most of all, Chinese investors understand one crucial fact: No one’s money or property is safe as long as the Chinese Communist Party is in power.
This is especially true in the Xi Jinping era. Xi’s anti-corruption campaign has devoured the fortunes of millions of Chinese, party officials and businessmen alike. Billionaires like Jack Ma of Alibaba and Xu Jiayin of Evergrande are in internal exile or jail.
In fact, the scale of corruption in China is so large, and the scope of Xi’s campaign so broad that, as the economy falters, seizing the fortunes of corrupt officials alone has become a major source of government revenue. Chinese dissident journalist Jennifer Zeng estimates that the amount confiscated over the past 10 years may be as much as $30 trillion dollars, or roughly double the country’s annual GDP. [emphasis in original]
RTWT.
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