China has begun to appear “uninvestable” in the judgment of U.S. business leaders, according to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
"Increasingly I hear from American business that China is uninvestable because it's become too risky,” Raimondo said while traveling between meetings in Beijing and Shanghai. "So businesses look for other opportunities, they look for other countries, they look for other places to go.”
HALF OF MAJOR LITHIUM DEALS SINCE 2018 WERE MADE BY CHINESE FIRMS, STUDY SAYS
Raimondo arrived Sunday in Beijing on a dual mission to defend U.S. restrictions on China’s access to sensitive technology, such as advanced semiconductors and the equipment to manufacture them, while also touting opportunities for symbiotic economic relationships in low-risk areas. Yet her visit is taking place just months after a corporate survey showed a surge in American aversion to doing business under the communist regime.
“There are the traditional concerns that they’ve become accustomed to dealing with,” Raimondo told reporters. “And then there’s a whole new set of concerns, the sum total of which is making China feel too risky for them to invest.”
Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping’s regime has stoked those anxieties with a series of high-profile legal maneuvers in recent years — ranging from the “politically motivated” arrest of two Canadian businessmen following Ottawa’s cooperation in the U.S. prosecution of a Huawei executive to recent restrictions targeting a pair of U.S. semiconductor heavyweights, Micron and Intel, in apparent retaliation for U.S. restrictions on China’s semiconductor industry.
More than a quarter of U.S. business executives reported a growing interest in investing in countries other than China, according to an April survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in China — up from 6% in November 2022. Along the same lines, “38 percent of member companies felt that foreign companies were treated unfairly as compared with domestic companies in China last year,” according to a report from the Asia Times. And the atmosphere has turned chilly even as China’s economy continues to struggle.
“China has really restrict[ed] a lot of Americans' access to Chinese markets, to Chinese investment, and they put basically in a whole bunch of laws to make it [so] virtually every American businessman in China is suspect[ed of being] a spy,” the Hudson Institute’s Miles Yu, a former China policy adviser to then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, told the Washington Examiner. “All the reasons why Chinese economy is in trouble is because China are not following international free trade system. It's a policy-driven, politically-driven. It's ideologically driven.”
Chinese officials sought to present a collegial attitude in public appearances with Raimondo.
“Only through dialogue can we understand each other’s concerns, find common ground and increase the possibility of cooperation,” Chinese Premier Li Qiang said Tuesday. “A well-maintained economic and trade relationship is beneficial to both [our] countries and the whole world.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The private meetings, to judge from Raimondo’s account of them, featured less candor from her Chinese interlocutors. She "raised key issues of concern for U.S. businesses and workers, including the level playing field for U.S. companies and workers, PRC subsidization of industry, and underdeveloped intellectual property protections,” according to a Commerce Department summary of her meeting with Li, for instance. And she pressed Chinese officials to provide the kind of explanation for their treatment of Micron and Intel that she offered to justify U.S. regulations.
“Our export controls are clear, are transparent,” Raimondo said. “There’s been no rationale given around what’s happened to Micron, there’s been limited due prices, and that’s why I brought it up.”