Sternfels, the firm’s global managing partner, was one of several U.S. business leaders who traveled to the Chinese capital for the China Development Forum.
McKinsey’s top executive, Bob Sternfels, quietly traveled to Beijing last month for a high-powered business conference during which Chinese officials wooed Western executives.
Sternfels, the firm’s global managing partner, was one of several U.S. business leaders who traveled to the Chinese capital for the China Development Forum, a high-profile confab in late March that convened Americans and Chinese leaders. The gathering is hosted by the China Development Research Foundation, a think tank that sits under China’s State Council.
But unlike other companies, McKinsey did not publicize its chief’s meetings at the high-profile gathering, and media reporting about his trip came from Chinese language media in the country. That stands in stark contrast to other executives, such as Apple CEO Tim Cook, who conducted interviews with Chinese party-state propaganda outlets and posed for photos with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Sternfels does not appear to have given any interviews or joined public engagements with Chinese officials.
The only public-facing part of Sternfels’s trip came when he joined panels on “population structure change” and the future of artificial intelligence, which were written up by the Chinese business outlet Caixin and China News Service, a Chinese Communist Party propaganda newswire.
A spokesperson for McKinsey defended his appearance at the forum. “We believe in a strong private sector and economic engagement, which is why our work in China focuses on multinational and Chinese private sector firms, and why our managing partner attended a forum alongside more than 70 CEOs, board chairs and other executives from US and global firms,” the spokesperson said.
That relatively low-key approach follows years of intense congressional scrutiny of McKinsey’s simultaneous role as a contractor for U.S. defense and intelligence agencies and Chinese state owned firms — a conflict of interests that lawmakers and experts consider a noteworthy national security vulnerability.
Pending legislation would block federal contractors from working for foreign adversaries of the U.S.
The website of the firm’s presence in China previously advertised work for central government ministries, as National Review previously reported. And a McKinsey-backed think tank produced a report advising China’s government to meld private-sector and government research on technologies with defense applications. McKinsey maintains that the since-defunct website contained inaccurate information and told the Financial Times that it did not author the report. A source familiar with McKinsey’s thinking said that approximately 2 percent of the firm’s revenue came from its China operations last year.
Sternfels appeared before the Senate in February 2024. “We do no work, and to the best of my knowledge never have, for the Chinese Communist Party or for the central government in China,” he said in his testimony. McKinsey representatives have additionally asserted that the company has never done work for the Chinese Communist Party or the Central Military Commission.
Senator Josh Hawley, who is leading legislation to bar companies that work for China from securing contracts with the federal government, rebuked Sternfels for those remarks at the time and accused him of lying. During his time in the senate, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was another leading critic of McKinsey’s work in China.
In a statement to National Review about Sternfels’s recent trip, Hawley doubled down on his criticism of the company. “Bob Sternfels traveling to Beijing to meet with the Chinese government is the least surprising news to come out of McKinsey & Company,” Hawley said. “Contrary to what he told me under oath before the Senate, McKinsey was — and, evidently, still is — deep in China’s pocket and has no intention to change. We need to pass my Time to Choose Act, so firms like McKinsey can’t make billions in U.S. government contracts all while making gobs of money advising our greatest adversary.”
“We follow the most rigorous client selection policy in our profession and welcome Senator Hawley’s proposed legislation,” the McKinsey spokesperson said.