US-China investment ties remain deep despite 'decoupling' efforts: FT

BEIJING - Despite the United States' strategic rivalry with China, when "it comes to making money, there is much more that attracts than repels," The Financial Times (FT) said in an analysis published Thursday.

In its article "US-China investment flows belie geopolitical tensions", the FT said that "data show efforts by former US President Donald Trump's administration to decouple the Chinese and US economies have fallen apart."

US institutional investors, including Fidelity and BlackRock, feature prominently among investors in the IPO of Kuaishou, a popular Chinese short video platform, which is expected to raise up to $6.3 billion, the article said.

"Instead of decoupling financially, the US and China now have one of the largest and fastest-growing bilateral investment relationships in the world," the FT quoted Nicholas Borst at Seafarer Capital Partners, an investment adviser as saying.

Bilateral investment ties are much deeper than official statistics suggest since American investors held $1.1 trillion in equity issued by Chinese companies at the end of 2020 -- or about five times more than the $211 billion captured by official US data as of September 2020, the article said, citing estimates from research company Rhodium Group.

In 2020, Chinese companies raised $19 billion in primary and secondary offerings on US exchanges last year, a total eclipsed only in 2014 thanks to Alibaba's mammoth $25 billion IPO in New York, the FT said.

Endeavors by the Trump administration to blacklist Chinese companies or bar Americans from investing in them, have "clearly not curbed market appetite for greater financial integration," the paper quoted Thilo Hanemann, a partner at Rhodium as saying.