When China’s Economy Slumps, so Does Beijing’s Political Power
Commentary
China’s economy is in desperate straits. So desperate that officials in one county in Guangdong Province offered an illegal bribe to U.S. investors.
Any U.S. corporate “decision maker” who brings investment, according to The Wall Street Journal, would get 10 percent of the deal’s total value. A $100 million investment by a U.S. company, for example, could yield a kickback of $10 million to the company’s CEO. Shareholders would be stuck with the lousy investment while the CEO laughed all the way to the bank and then cried onward to prison.
Meanwhile, the value of investments in China is increasingly hard to estimate as the regime treats normal due diligence activities by U.S. companies as espionage and due diligence firms withdraw or downsize in the communist country….