Biden wants China and the United States to decouple, but can't control the desire of enterprises to pursue profits, a variety of funds in the United States continue to bet on China's economy, $68 billion in three years into China, and promised to continue to invest in the future, Biden's congressional agencies came forward to ask American companies to withdraw from China and stop investing in China, but with little effect.
Biden's high-intensity series of trade restrictions have indeed achieved some results in the past two years, and the trade volume between China and the United States, especially the U.S. imports to China, has declined significantly, but with the further progress of "decoupling", Biden's decoupling strategy has encountered new and more difficult to solve difficulties, that is, the growth expectations of the U.S. economy are not satisfactory, and the economic increment required for the normal operation of society is difficult to obtain completely from the United States.
According to a survey by the American think tank "Future Alliance", the 74 public pension funds with the largest investment in China in the United States have made more than 1,100 investments in Chinese domestic enterprises and financial institutions from 2021 to 2023, with a total investment of more than 68 billion US dollars, including Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Macao.
The Future Alliance also said that "since a significant number of public funds keep their asset allocations secret, it is likely that this figure represents only a fraction or even a small fraction of the total amount invested".
In addition, these funds have also made a clear commitment to continue to invest in China in the future, most of these funds are distributed in the northern Democratic areas of the United States, such as California and New York State, and in addition to public pension funds, they also radiate to more sensitive areas such as university endowments, and the latter type of funds have invested nearly $10 billion in China.
What worries the US side even more is that a large part of these investments actually entered China after 2020, and before 2020, due to China's restrictions on the opening of the market on the US side, China's sensitive financial industries such as banking and insurance were not open to US companies and fund institutions, and the relaxation of control in related fields was mainly due to the signing of the "China-US Phase One Economic and Trade Agreement" in 2020 After that, the investment of various US fund institutions in China led to a considerable proportion of US dollars flowing into China, and the huge public pension industry in the United States began to deploy in China.
And the background of all this is after the Biden administration actually started a trade war! Why is it said that Biden "actually started a trade war"? Because Trump was the first US president to put forward the slogan of a trade war, but in fact the impact on Sino-US trade during Trump's term of office was relatively small, and Trump's trade war was actually more focused on "collecting taxes" than destroying the trade pattern between the two countries and promoting the decoupling of the bilateral economy As long as the federal government can impose tariffs on Chinese companies, Trump will be able to deal with other aspects.
But Biden is different, many of Biden's policies after taking office have disrupted Sino-US trade and promoted the process of economic decoupling between the two countries far more than Trump, especially reducing imports to China and reducing the dependence of the United States on China's supply chain, in 2020, imports of goods to China accounted for 20% of U.S. foreign trade imports, and in 2023 this figure is expected to be reduced to less than 14%, Biden's boast of "Sino-US decoupling" actually has some realistic basis.
However, at the financial and other levels, the United States has not only failed to decouple from China, but has fallen into a deeper dependence, because the financial industry first pursues stability, and secondly, pursues profits under the premise of stability.
In recent years, the situation of the U.S. economy has been not good, and the Biden administration has been falsifying various statement data in the past year in order to fool the public, but the growth rate of the U.S. economy is still not good enough.
Moreover, after the 2020 pandemic, the U.S. government has used various economic stimulus policies intensively for several years, starting a nuclear-powered money printing machine to vigorously release water, which has led to the depreciation of the dollar in the United States and the increase in inflation.
In this case, where the funds in the United States invest their money actually represents which country's development prospects they are optimistic about, and obviously they have good expectations for China, otherwise they would not have invested a total of more than $80 billion in just two or three years, and this is also a vote of no confidence in the American economy.
Since 2023, the Biden administration has been promoting the "Chinese economic crisis" in an attempt to convince everyone that China's economy will not only not recover after the epidemic ends, but will also fall into a depression.
Biden's influential "U.S.-China Strategic Competition Committee of the House of Representatives" also issued a professional report of hundreds of pages, warning those U.S. public funds that invest in China that they should transfer assets and withdraw from China as soon as possible, avoid risks, and invest money in American companies instead of Chinese companies, because China's economic growth is not long-lasting, and China's economic model does not conform to WTO regulations.
This is the usual method of previous US administrations, but this time it did not work, all relevant professionals admit that although the current growth rate of China's economy has slowed down, they do not agree with the possibility that China will fall into economic depression, because China is after all supported by a very strong industry, which is different from the United States, but now the United States has a more obvious tendency to economic crisis.
In this case, in 2023, Biden-led U.S. manufacturing reshoring project, most of the assistance received by related companies comes from federal financial allocations, rather than private capital investment, in the last two years of Biden's administration, the crisis of the U.S. economy has brewed to the point where the government needs to take strong intervention measures to suppress risks, and things like free markets are completely ineffective, it can be said that even according to the play of American neoliberalism, the economic competition between China and the United States still does not show much tendency to benefit the United States, and all the efforts of Biden's decoupling policy have been offset by the risk of failure of the U.S. economy。