When three of your fervent supporters tell you, a few hours apart, that you are going straight in the wall, your interest is to take their opinions into consideration. Even if your name is Xi Jinping and are at the head of a country of 1.4 billion inhabitants. However, three influential businessmen – a European industrialist, an American economist and a Chinese financier – come, each on his side, to sound the alarm: China is bad, they say.
Let’s start with Weijian Shan, the Chinese financier. Born in 1954, a few months after the current president, he was sent “in rehabilitation” during the cultural revolution. But Weijian Shan left the country from Mao’s death. Direction: The United States. Passed by the World Bank, the JP Morgan bank and the TPG investment fund, it now runs PAG, an investment fund installed in Hong Kong, with more than $ 50 billion (47.5 billion euros) of capital.
This former administrator of Lenovo and recently appointed in that of Alibaba embodies the opening of China to the world. However, in a video addressed to its customers – which the Financial Times intercepted -, Weijian Shan considers that China is currently undergoing “a deep economic crisis” comparable to what the West lived in 2008. According to him, “The Chinese economy has never been in such a bad form for thirty years”. Same observation for “popular discontent”, which he said has never been so high since the 1990s. If it remains “long -term confident on Chinese growth”, it says “very prudent” on D ‘Possible financial investments in the country.
The second, Stephen Roach, is a former president of Morgan Stanley Asia and has earned a lot of money thanks to China. When, under Donald Trump, Chinese propaganda needed an American lawyer, it is often to him that she appealed.
Thursday, April 28, at the very moment when the Financial Times revealed the words of Weijian Shan, this economist as listened to in Wall Street that in Beijing granted an interview to Supchina, an online media specialized in China: according to him, The main Chinese problems – zero covid policy, proximity to Russia, the setting in step of tech … – come under “a surprisingly rigid decision -making process, which, first, is unable to recognize its mistakes and, Second, is not flexible enough to adopt a different strategy “. For him, “even a single party and an authoritarian state need to have debates and be able to look in the mirror”.
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