Friends of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) around the world, unite! Liberal outlet Bloomberg News recently praised local CCP officials for becoming great “venture capitalists,” especially through funding electric vehicle startups like Tesla rival Nio.
The Bloomberg News story was such a hit that the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba Group and has ties to the Chinese government, also published it on its website on Feb. 7. Bloomberg News Senior Reporter on China Economy Tom Hancock argued that “China’s newest class of venture capitalists” was none other than “Communist officials.” Hancock later demolished his argument by asserting that those same CCP officials were seeking to “win promotion from the ruling Communist Party.”
Hancock gave contradictory evidence for his claims that CCP officials are good capitalists, too: “The municipal government of Hefei, a city in eastern China, pledged 5 billion yuan ($787 million) to acquire a 17% stake in Nio’s core business.”
But wait, there’s more.
Hancock added, “It might look like the kind of power grab some observers see as characteristic of President Xi Jinping’s China: an assertive state enforcing an ever-growing list of dictates on innovative private companies that are destined to discourage entrepreneurship. But the story didn’t play out that way.” [Emphasis added].
Hancock then arrived at an absurd conclusion: Nio was a successful investment for Hefei, therefore the “Hefei model” of government intrusion into private business should be taken seriously, and CCP officials should be understood more like “private investor[s] in London or New York.”
That argument would make sense if CCP officials were private citizens, but they are not. Investing alone won’t change that.
Hancock then undermined his argument even further:
“China’s local governments control land sales, receive profits from state-owned companies, and have close ties with state-owned banks.” He continued, “That’s helped local officials, largely judged on the basis of economic performance, to win promotion from the ruling Communist Party.”
National Public Radio (NPR) broke a bombshell report in April 2020 that alleged Bloomberg News suppressed an investigation into CCP elites by one of its reporters.
NPR alleged that Bloomberg News leadership fired a reporter and threatened his family with financial destruction if they refused to kill the story. Bloomberg News founding Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler’s purported the following for why the story was too great a risk:
“It is for sure going to, you know, invite the Communist Party to, you know, completely shut us down and kick us out of the country … So, I just don't see that as a story that is justified … There's a way to use the information you have in such a way that enables us to report, but not kill ourselves in the process and wipe out everything we've tried to build there," [emphasis added].
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Bloomberg News at letters@bloomberg.net and demand the outlet stop writing propaganda favorable to the Chinese Communist Party.
