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China Cuts Its Trillion Dollar Nose To Spite America’s Face

As China annihilated its edtech and consumer internet companies, American savings became a massive collateral casualty.

<div class="paragraphs"><p>Screen showing a live news broadcast of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the National People's Congress in Beijing, China, on March 5, 2021. (Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg)</p></div>
Screen showing a live news broadcast of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the National People's Congress in Beijing, China, on March 5, 2021. (Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg)

How can China clobber America?

This question has consumed wonks since the noughties when China began to creep up on a terror-and-subprime ravaged America. Military experts thought China would reconquer Taiwan, forcing America to fight a conventional war on China’s turf. Energy specialists thought China would use its “nuclear and gas influence” over Europe to weaken NATO. Techies propagated China’s legendary capabilities in cyber-attacks and robotics to write America’s obituary in futuristic battlefields. But hardly anybody thought China could use an economic weapon against America, although the portents of a ‘wealth attack’ were hiding in plain sight.

Let’s go back to the beginning here.

China Cuts Its Trillion Dollar Nose To Spite America’s Face

How China Used Escape Velocity To Marshal Trillions of Dollars of American Debt

Tomes have been written about how Deng Xiaoping transformed China into a multi-trillion-dollar economic superpower to rival America. In my book Superpower? The Amazing Race Between China’s Hare and India’s Tortoise (Penguin Allen Lane, 2010), I have postulated the “escape velocity” model, powered by two engines borrowed from Soviet Union and Japan, that enabled China to become the second largest global economy, snapping at America’s heels.

<div class="paragraphs"><p>A portrait of Deng Xiaoping is reflected on the glass wall of an underpass entrance near Deng Xiaoping Portrait Square in Shenzhen, China. (Photographer: Yan Cong/Bloomberg)</p></div>

A portrait of Deng Xiaoping is reflected on the glass wall of an underpass entrance near Deng Xiaoping Portrait Square in Shenzhen, China. (Photographer: Yan Cong/Bloomberg)

Using communist coercion, China began extracting massive surpluses through the 1970s-90s:

  • From farmers, by expropriating their land at throwaway prices

  • From workers, by keeping wages at sub-human levels

  • From consumers, by keeping the yuan artificially low against the U.S. dollar

  • From competing economies, especially America, by keeping the yuan artificially low against the US dollar (note how this tactic is getting repeated). This helped China-domiciled firms to export goods on a gargantuan scale to the West, building fantastic reserves of U.S. dollars

The surplus extraction from farmers, workers, and consumers was on a scale as epic as Stalinist Russia, creating physical assets and social infrastructure on a scale hitherto unknown to mankind. At one stage, China was investing nearly half – I will say that again – almost 50% of its GDP in infrastructure.

But then Deng sprung a twist in the tale. Unlike the Soviets, he borrowed a leaf from the Japanese economic revolution, throwing China open to foreign trade and investment. Not just that, he also learnt the ‘dirty currency’ lesson from the Japanese, who had powered their exports by keeping the yen artificially depreciated against the U.S. dollar through the ‘’1970s.

<div class="paragraphs"><p>Vehicles sit parked in the parking lot of the SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile Co. Baojun Base plant in 2017. (Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg)</p></div>

Vehicles sit parked in the parking lot of the SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile Co. Baojun Base plant in 2017. (Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg)

China began wooing foreign investors with cheap land, labour, infrastructure, and currency to become the ‘factory of the world’. As its foreign currency reserves swelled, China also became the “treasury of the world”. At its peak in 2011, China held nearly $1.1 trillion of American paper, about a tenth (i.e. 10%) of the total stock. It was a happy and virtuous cycle – as America consumed more Chinese exports, China lent even more dollars to America to fuel that consumption.

But financial experts were getting alarmed at China’s ability to inflict ‘economic terror’ on America - i.e. if the Chinese dumped Uncle Sam’s debt, American interest rates could rise uncontrollably, crushing an economy reeling from the after-shocks of the sub-prime crisis. Mercifully, China sued for peace.

Today, even though China’s stock of U.S. treasuries is down to about 5%, it’s still a little over $1 trillion, enough to keep the threat of ‘economic terror’ dangling over the US.

China Annihilates Tech Heroes; America Suffers Massive Wealth Casualty

But elsewhere, China has been building another cache of a trillion dollars that everybody considered benign and ‘win-win’. From the turn of the 21st century, Chinese companies have been in a frantic race to list in America.

One of these was NetEase, a leading Chinese internet technology company that went public in June of 2000. Lo behold, it has given investors a return of 18,000% in 21 years, beating the iconic Amazon which has ‘merely’ returned 8,700%!

As other Chinese IPOs rushed in, American savers picked up billions of dollars of new equity to feast on the Dragon’s astonishing growth. The frenzy peaked when Jack Ma’s fabled Alibaba scooped up $25 billion in 2014. It was the biggest IPO in America, quickly joining an elite club of Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet, as the five most-owned stocks by hedge funds.

Despite spiraling acrimony and confrontation between America and China, nothing stopped the IPO juggernaut. Not even the shadowy ownership of several companies with invisible links to the CCP or Chinese military. Not even their refusal to get mandatory audits done by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), taking refuge behind China’s secrecy laws.

These dodgy creds were terribly uncomfortable, but the gravy train was unstoppable.

At the beginning of this year, 248 Chinese companies worth over $2 trillion were listed in the U.S., with American investors holding over a trillion dollars of this wealth. In just the first quarter of 2021, nearly $7 billion were raised, an eightfold increase over the previous year!

Everything was going swimmingly.

But earlier, a big crack had occurred in October 2020, which was ignored by the go-go crowd. It was Alibaba again, whose subsidiary, Ant Group, was looking to raise $35 billion, beating its own 2014 record. However, perhaps in a momentary lapse, Jack Ma publicly criticised China’s regulators. The Chinese government responded ferociously by forcing a sudden, last minute suspension of Ant’s IPO.

Jack Ma went off the radar. Alibaba’s shares collapsed by 40% on NYSE.

<div class="paragraphs"><p>A video recording of Jack Ma's first public appearance after months,  addressing teachers at an annual event on Jan. 20, 2021. (Photographer: Justin Chin/Bloomberg)</p></div>

A video recording of Jack Ma's first public appearance after months, addressing teachers at an annual event on Jan. 20, 2021. (Photographer: Justin Chin/Bloomberg)

Yet nobody had bargained for what followed nine months later.

Didi, China’s Uber-like ride-hailing app, had a rousing IPO in New York on Jun. 30. In less than a week, Didi was banned from Chinese app stores, citing data privacy concerns. Nearly $ 17 billion of American wealth was wiped out.

Then food delivery platform Meituan was ordered to comply with tough labour laws, destroying a third of its value.

In a breathtaking reversal, Chinese ed-tech companies were prohibited from doing commercial business. Overnight, their revenue models killed. TAL Education, New Oriental, and Gaotu Techedu, three of the largest U.S.-listed Chinese edtech companies, lost 70% of their market cap in hours.

Continuing the onslaught, Tencent’s exclusive rights over 80% of China’s music library were rescinded. The marquee company lost $170 billion of shareholders’ wealth in a few days, perhaps the single-largest stock wipeout in a month ever recorded.

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American investors were left stunned, speechless, and flat-footed by such an epic destruction of wealth. China may have annihilated its edtech and consumer internet companies to control domestic data and/or cull overweening entrepreneurs, but American savings became a massive collateral casualty.

So, China had finally clobbered America – not militarily in Taiwan or South China Sea, not via a cyber attack, not even by dumping American bonds – but by destroying the American lifeline which had nourished its tech giants.

China had cut its trillion-dollar nose to spite America’s face.

The self-flagellation was least expected.

It was a typically Chinese manoeuvre. Inscrutable!

Raghav Bahl is Co-Founder – The Quint Group including BloombergQuint. He is the author of three books, viz ‘Superpower?: The Amazing Race Between China’s Hare and India’s Tortoise’, ‘Super Economies: America, India, China & The Future Of The World’, and ‘Super Century: What India Must Do to Rise by 2050’.