Commentary
By strangling the Chinese economy and crushing human rights, President Xi Jinping is rapidly turning China into a bad gamble for Western investors and multinational corporations.
China’s dictator has run into increasing, if carefully expressed, criticism from top-profile figures within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—including Premier Li Keqiang—over Xi’s ideological struggle to promote state capitalism alongside his quixotic and increasingly troubled zero-COVID policy.
Due to China’s increasingly difficult regulatory environment, UBS, the largest private investment bank in the world, has already dropped China’s gross domestic product growth rate estimate this year from 5.5 percent to 3.0 percent—hardly what the world thinks of as Chinese levels of growth. Li has publicly stated that this drop in the growth rate is unacceptable, especially as the economy hasn’t slowed this badly since 1990….