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'Chexit': Global Asset Managers Are Fleeing China
Authored by Anders Corr via The Epoch Times,
Fidelity International (FIL) is reportedly the latest fund manager to plan a pullout from its China fund. FIL launched a wholly-owned subsidiary in Shanghai three years ago, but a lack of demand from retail investors led to disappointing growth.
Reuters first reported the story. According to its sources, "A combination of fierce local competition, frequent leadership turnover and chronic struggles to build scale ultimately convinced global FIL executives that the China retail venture was untenable."
FIL has $1.18 trillion in assets under management (AUM). It started its China fund in 2023. The next year, Reuters saw an internal FIL document that said it needed more than $14 billion in assets to become profitable. After several years, it had reportedly reached only about $670 million (less than 5 percent of the goal) and began planning an exit.
Fidelity follows multiple other global asset managers that are backing away from China amid domestic competition and geopolitical tensions. These include Schroders, Legal & General, and Vanguard. The companies that left China were in stiff competition with domestic funds and Western China funds that had typically first been established through joint ventures (JVs) with Chinese institutions.
In 2019, Beijing invited global fund managers, for the first time, to establish wholly-owned China funds. The regime framed the invitation as part of a trade agreement, and the latter sought access to the Chinese public's $12.8 trillion in investable assets. For some of the international investors, it did not end well.
In 2020 and 2021, respectively, the Chinese regime issued permits to BlackRock and Neuberger Berman to start such funds. They both had ties to the regime and headquarters in Shanghai. In 2021, BlackRock raised $1 billion for its fund in its first week, which impressed other institutional investors. It was the first mutual fund owned by foreigners to be granted permission to sell directly to Chinese customers, and it did very well, at least at first.
Several other large asset managers converted their JVs into wholly-owned funds by buying out their JV partners. These then became the largest and most successful wholly foreign-owned public fund houses in China.
Some institutions, including Fidelity, Schroders, and BlackRock, launched greenfield, wholly-owned China funds, but they tended to be smaller than the converted JVs, delivered lower returns, and were disappointing in terms of growth. In 2018, Vanguard's Asia CEO mentioned a possible future China AUM of $5 trillion. But Vanguard was the first to close its Shanghai office in 2023.
The next year, Legal & General canceled plans to get a China business license and reduced its presence in Shanghai by about 80 percent.
Schroders, a British firm with AUM of $1.1 trillion, established a wholly-owned China fund management unit in 2023. But three years later, Schroders only managed $250 million. In May, news broke that the company planned to sell its China funds to a wholly-owned China unit of Neuberger Berman.
China has a $5.9 trillion public fund market dominated by domestic fund managers. Even as the smaller foreign-owned funds cut their losses in China, the larger ones are holding on.
JP Morgan Asset Management China is the largest foreign-owned fund with $34 billion in AUM. Manulife China has $17 billion, and Morgan Stanley China has $4.5 billion. These three funds started as joint ventures and then bought out their Chinese partners. Their returns tend to be better than those of new ventures, with about a third of their funds getting above 10 percent.
Most new foreign-owned funds posted a year-to-date return of less than 5 percent in June, which is far below the returns of the leading domestic fund managers. The top 11 Chinese companies each have more than $147 billion in AUM. Yicai has noted that the best 15 domestic funds had returns of at least 90 percent, which likely attracted some retail investors.
Domestic funds reportedly have multiple advantages over western funds, including brand recognition, established online and bank distribution channels, and low-overhead index and money-market businesses dominated by locals.
According to a Yicai Global source, "Most domestic fund managers have spent decades building out full product lines, gaining deep experience, earning a track record investors recognize, building local sales networks, and learning Chinese investors' preferences."
Other Yicai sources note that to compete, foreign companies should localize their management, research, investment, and sales teams.
There may be other advantages less frequently noted. A Fitch Ratings analyst put it bluntly when discussing the entrance of foreign banks into China's retail banking space in 2007.
"Foreign banks don't break people's arms when they don't repay them, like some Chinese banks might," the analyst said. "They can't operate like that, so what they have to focus on is the high end of the retail market."
Another challenge is unspoken regime bias against foreign companies, combined with overregulation. In June, for example, China's top securities regulator targeted algorithmic trading, which is one of the West's bright spots, not only internationally but in China trading.
The measures hit domestic algo traders as well, but they block one avenue in which foreign firms hold an advantage. Regular domestic managers have closer ties to regime agencies and exchange relationships and, therefore, better access to market data and regulatory largesse.
This isn't the first time that foreign banks have been squeezed in China to the advantage of domestic actors. The British pioneered modern banking in Shanghai in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Banks from other countries, including Germany, France, Japan, and the United States, entered later.
But after the revolution of 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took over the most lucrative businesses of the banks and forced them to maintain idle workers. This forced most of them out in the 1950s. The two major foreign banks that remained, Standard Chartered (under a prior name) and HSBC, lost market share. Starting in 1979, the CCP gradually reopened its financial sector to foreign entities while ensuring that its domestic banks remained dominant.
With an uneven playing field and unfair referees, China is not the best of opportunities for Western investors. In the case of companies like Fidelity, Schroders, Vanguard, and Legal & General, the numbers did not add up and probably never will.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
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AI Skepticism Outweighs Excitement In The US
Despite the tech industry’s conviction that the rise of AI is an inflection point that will change the course of humanity, many humans remain skeptical whether the new direction we’re headed in is the right one.
As Statista's Felix Richter reports below, the pace at which AI seems to be taking over parts of our lives, whether we like it or not, is especially worrisome to many.
In a recent Statista Consumer Insights survey, 31 percent of U.S. respondents said that they were worried about the speed at which AI is developing and 25 percent of respondents claimed to be avoiding AI wherever they can.
18 percent said they used AI but felt bad about it and another 28 percent simply don’t believe in the hype, saying they weren’t convinced that AI is as good as people say.
You will find more infographics at Statista
At the other end of the spectrum, 28 percent of respondents said they were excited about AI, 19 percent said they liked to use AI for shopping and 15 percent described themselves as early adopters – always keen to try the latest AI features first.
The bottom line is that Americans are neither all in on AI nor are they fully against it.
Many people are mixing their excitement with a dose of skepticism, which is probably a good way of looking at a potentially life-altering technological shift.
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The Arday Tragedy: A Story Of Institutional Failure, Not A Witch Hunt
Authored by Lipton Matthews via The Mises Institute,
The recent death of Jason Arday has been met with widespread grief, but also with a disturbing rush to assign blame.
Much of the media narrative has positioned Nathan Cofnas as the villain, the man who exposed plagiarism and, in doing so, supposedly hounded a vulnerable academic to his death.
This is a convenient story, but it is not the truth.
Let us be clear. Nathan Cofnas did nothing wrong. Yet he has been suspended from his post as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University. He brought to light legitimate concerns about Jason Arday’s academic record. That is the function of journalism and scholarly scrutiny. If the allegations were false, Arday would have defended himself more effectively. If they were true, then they deserved to be aired. The fact that Arday was mentally unwell is tragic, but it does not retroactively make Cofnas’s actions malicious. We do not hold journalists responsible for the pre-existing vulnerabilities of those they cover.
This is not the first time a scandal has broken around a prominent figure. Stephen Glass—once a star at the New Republic—saw his career implode when his fabrications were exposed. He did not retreat; he wrote a novel about his disgrace, turning infamy into profit. Jayson Blair—the New York Times plagiarist—did the same. Both men monetized their scandals. Jason Arday’s exposure came in the age of social media, so the venom was more intense, but the principle is unchanged. Public figures often exploit controversy for personal gain. That Arday could not do so is unfortunate, but it is not evidence of a uniquely cruel campaign against him.
What is striking about Arday’s case is the institutional support he received. Diane Abbott and prominent Cambridge academics rallied to his defence. Compare this to the treatment of Charles Negy, Linda Gottfredson, Arthur Jensen, Helmut Nyborg, and others who have been vilified as racists simply for engaging with research on intelligence and group differences. Gottfredson continues to be defamed by the disgraced Southern Poverty Law Center. Nyborg had to sue the Danish Committees for Scientific Dishonesty for falsely accusing him of scientific misconduct. Negy is not even a race researcher; he was penalized by his university for saying that black privilege is real. As Negy put it, “beyond affirmative action, special scholarships, and other set asides, being shielded from legitimate criticism is itself a form of privilege.” None of these scholars had the institutional backing that Arday enjoyed. He was given an opportunity on a platter of gold. However, he failed to distinguish himself and, when the scrutiny came, he could not withstand it.
The real lesson of this harrowing tale is not a racist media hounding a black academic to death. It is the intensity of what might reasonably be called black privilege—a system that elevates individuals to positions they are not prepared for, shields them from criticism, and then reacts with shock when reality intrudes. Mike Adams - a white academic - was badgered to suicide in 2020 by social media and his university simply because people found his tweets offensive. Unlike Arday, he received no institutional support from elite institutions, nor was there an outpouring of solidarity. The difference between his case and Arday’s is glaring.
Invariably, the hatred directed at Nathan Cofnas stems not from his role in the Arday affair, but from his wider writings on race and intelligence. Cofnas holds that racial differences in intelligence are partially genetic. This is controversial, but it is not unsupported. Psychologist Russell Warne has defended similar positions in his book In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths About Human Intelligence. Even if the hereditarian view is ultimately wrong, the environmentalist thesis has failed to produce a convincing alternative. Not much has changed since Arthur Jensen’s landmark 1969 report How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? Robert Plomin’s more recent text Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are reinforces the point that parental influence is largely genetic. Cognitive gaps between blacks and whites persist even when both groups are similar in socioeconomic status, education, and other environmental measures. The reality is that—irrespective of the truth of hereditarianism—groups will differ in behavior and intelligence. If elites would simply accept this, we could stop obsessing over erasing every disparity and instead focus on helping people thrive where they are.
In an ordinary world, Jason Arday might have been a successful PE teacher, or even a comedian.
He had charm, energy, and a compelling personal story.
He died because Cambridge elevated him to a position for which he was not prepared, and the inevitable scrutiny crushed him.
When he was alive, Arday said he wanted the world to spin on an axis of love. But the truth is that the DEI fanaticism that elevated him, and ultimately destroyed him, was propelled by an excess of love for egalitarianism, a love so blind that it refused to see the human cost of its own ideology.
Jason Arday’s death is a tragedy. But it is not Nathan Cofnas’s fault. It is the fault of a system that prioritizes symbolism over substance, and then abandons its symbols when they fail.
If we want to honor Arday’s memory, we should begin by telling the truth about how he got there and who really put him in harm’s way.
Tyler Durden Sat, 08/29/2026 - 22:10