Hacker News Reader

Comment by supernetworks_ | Hacker News Reader

Americans can’t invest directly in Chinese companies and shouldn’t be obligated to host Chinese companies in their markets or be surprised when political whims ban them, since the lack of shared investment is political too. People clearly enjoy the content on there so the outcome is sad but it’s a complicated economic dynamic that is hard to grasp

View on HN

    > Americans can’t invest directly in Chinese companies

This is not true. You can trade onshore Mainland China stocks through the Hongkong Stock Exchange. There is a special programmed called "Northbound" and "Southbound" in the broker-dealer industry. (This also allows investors from Mainland China to trades Hongkong stocks.) Any big brokerage should offer access to the Hongkong Stock Exchange. There is even a weird special currency called "CNH" that is the Chinese RMB that is allowed to settled in Hongkong, so you don't need a brokerage account in Mainland China to trade.

That’s a good clarification as not all companies are tech related and there are companies eligible for trading. However northbound trading still follows all applicable laws and there’s no access to direct ownership in some amazing companies

    > there’s no access to direct ownership in some amazing companies

Can you provide some examples?

Americans can definitely invest into most Chinese tech companies- the exception is direct investments into non-tech, licensed companies, that require a VIE structure, which enables Americans to still invest.

This is what I meant by direct investment. Owning true controlling shares versus the cayman economic proxy

Americans are selling iPhones into China and are getting exorbital profits from this though. Doesn't look fair to me.

They have Xiaomi - they are free to ban iPhones if they so choose.

60% of Bytedance is owned by American investors https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/technology/tiktok-investo...

> Susquehanna, a global trading firm, first invested in ByteDance in 2012 and now owns roughly 15 percent of the company, a person familiar with the investment said. The Chinese arm of Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, invested in ByteDance in 2014 when it was valued at $500 million. Sequoia’s U.S.-based growth fund later followed suit.

> General Atlantic, a private equity firm, invested in ByteDance in 2017 at a $20 billion valuation. Bill Ford, General Atlantic’s chief executive, has a seat on ByteDance’s board of directors. The company’s other notable U.S. investors include the private equity firms KKR and the Carlyle Group, as well as the hedge fund Coatue Management.

Literally does not matter. ByteDance is a Chinese company and beholden to the CCP.

Just like US companies are beholden to national security letters that can compel them to spy on non-US persons who may be users of their product?

If other countries ban US websites for specifically that reason, I applaud them.

Especially if they do it without being hypocritical.

China will not only ban American companies or services next, Xi will probably ban the US dollar.

That won’t happen. China would be more angry if the USA all of a sudden didn’t let them participate in treasury auctions.

You know there's a rumor saying Trump/Xi would trade Taiwan with US treasury bonds.

The funny thing is. China can talk about removing the U.S. dollar and trade when Yen. But they need a stable currency to convert between and so conversion is still done with the U.S. dollar. The U.S. dollar won’t be removed from trade in our life time.

China doesn’t let the RMB float freely, so trade still happens in dollars. Also, the American government buys a lot of treasuries, so it’s easy to save a few billion quickly when you need to, which isn’t really supported by any other currency…saving money by lending it to the USG conversely prevents it from re-entering your own economy and stoking inflation (China isn’t the only country to use the USA like that, Japan buys more treasuries than China usually).

No, not like that.

Yes, it's exactly like that.

Are you suggesting that only a "perfect" government gets to counter the Chinese government's attacks?

It's name in English is the Communist Part of China, CPC not CCP.

This shit winds me up no end.

It feels almost like propaganda in itself, to evoke CCCP connotations.

It would be like if I just decided to start unilaterally referring to a "Language to Markup Hyper-Text" (LMHT) instead of its correct name.

tbf though, even the BBC can't get it right : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg68vyz9lgo

Exactly. I've never heard someone use 'CPC' before. It's quite obvious why the alternative isn't liked.

Apparently, the official CPC is pro-stablishment, unsurprisingly, while the common CCP is anti-stablisment

https://chinamediaproject.org/2023/03/30/ccp-or-cpc-a-china-...

I have been assuming that the ownership is in the Cayman company and it is analogous to the situation with VIEs.

The ownership would have no votes on controlling the company but only ownership for hypothetical dividends on profit from the cayman shell. If anybody knows otherwise please elucidate us.

Oddly enough Snapchat IPOd with stocks with zero control as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com