Why All The Change In China Matters To Us

Why All The Change In China Matters To Us

Andy Serwer with Max Zahn   Sat, October 2, 2021

Four somewhat random items caught my attention recently.

Item #1. A Snippet From A Conversation With Michael Dell

“It's kind of frosty, Andy,” Dell tells me in an interview. “The relationship is a little bit frosty at the moment.”

The relationship in question being that of China with the United States, particularly in the tech sector. The billionaire founder and CEO of his eponymous tech company went on to speak passionately about how “an incredible nation, like China, [was] deterministically investing in these strategic industries, and the U.S. [was] doing absolutely nothing” and how he hopes the latter point is changing.

Item #2. A Move By Cathie Wood

The FT reported that Wood, the ultra high-profile CEO of Ark Invest, had cooled on China:

“We have not eliminated our positions but we have reduced our positioning in China dramatically and we have swapped some of our holders, which became losers, into companies that we know are courting the government with ‘common prosperity’,” said Wood.

Item #3. A Scary Talk Resonates With A Group Of Swells

Earlier this week, I’m in the ballroom of an exclusive New York City Club for a lunch lecture by writer and provocateur Gordon Chang, who’s doing what he does best, scare the bejesus out of us about China.

I can’t tell you verbatim what Chang said as it was off the record, but I can report that it pretty much matched what he’s been saying elsewhere recently. Such as what he told Sinclair Broadcasting in a recent interview:

“The Biden administration should understand that China’s challenge to the United States is comprehensive, it’s malicious, that China intends to overthrow our government." Chang told Fox News that China put out a bounty to kill Americans in Afghanistan and “took steps to deliberately release the coronavirus from their own country...”

I wasn’t particularly surprised by what Chang said, as he’s been spouting these kinds of opinions for decades. Indeed, his most famous book, “The Coming Collapse of China,” came out 20 years ago. (Presumably the coming collapse is still coming.) No, what struck me was the response of the 100 or so people in attendance, mostly sophisticates of one sort or another who, some actually mouth agape, hung on Chang’s every word as if it were the gospel.

Reading the room, Chang’s notion that the Chinese are about to cross the Hudson or the Potomac or the Delaware and take over America seemed entirely plausible. While I’m not at all in that camp, part of me understands why some Americans might feel that way right now.

The fact is, news out of China these days is unsettling.

Big trouble at the highly leveraged Chinese real estate giant Evergrande hangs over the global financial markets. Meanwhile, a massive power supply crunch is reducing economic growth and threatening global supply chains.

Even more significant are moves by Chinese President Xi Jinping who has been asserting control over his country in ways that we in the United States, (as well as many China experts), never anticipated. Xi is clamping down on what he perceives to be "excesses," which we would consider unthinkable, surprising even to many Chinese. Xi is moving China center stage, moving America off its status quo. None of this is easy for us to digest. Changes in China are pronounced and highly visible.

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https://news.yahoo.com/why-all-the-change-in-china-matters-to-us-093054087.html