JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon wrote in his annual letter to shareholders that China will face increasing pressure to improve its human rights track record. However, he followed that up with an apparent contradiction.
"China will continue to face pressure from the United States and other Western governments over human rights, democracy and freedom in Hong Kong, and activity in the South China Sea and Taiwan,” Dimon said, according to his annual letter to the shareholders.
However, Dimon also wrote in that letter that “All countries, including China, want to lift up their people.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is committing genocide and crimes against humanity including imprisonment, torture and enforced sterilization against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs, according to a 2021 report to Congress.
Rana Siu Inboden, a senior fellow with the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas-Austin, discussed the poor treatment of the Chinese people in a Center for Strategic and International Studies podcast.
“The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership is ruling in such a way that they seem to value accruing power for their own purposes, retaining political control and gaining personal material benefit,” Inboden said in the podcast. The state’s overreach of power reverses any benefits, she said.
Inboden's opinions differ from JPMorgan’s CEO. China is bolder in abusing human rights, with estimates of more than 1 million workers detained in facilities resembling concentration camps, Inboden said in the podcast. Most of the workers disappeared despite no formal arrest records, Inboden said. Hong Kong protestors have been hunted as they attempt to flee.
“And I think this is largely because the PRC leadership thinks that they have sufficient global weight, that they can engage in this kind of repression without suffering consequences,” she said in the podcast.
Dimon's letter also recommends a tougher stance against China and says America is acting from a place of strength.
“For any products or materials that are essential for national security (think rare earths, 5G and semiconductors), the U.S. supply chain must either be domestic or open only to completely friendly allies,” he said, according to the letter. “We cannot and should not ever be reliant on processes that can and will be used against us, especially when we are most vulnerable.”
JPMorgan has worked for more than a century in China. Daniel Pinto, its president and chief operating officer, said the company’s investment relative to China’s size was not large when Nikkei asked why it continued to invest aggressively in the Asian nation.
“What we are doing is continuing to gradually invest in a very prudent way," Pinto said, according to Nikkei. “It would be unwise for us not to invest in China given the size of the country and the potential.”
