Clarifying My Recent China Comments

Now that things have calmed down I want to clarify what I meant when I sloppily answered a question about China from Andrew Ross Sorkin that created a misunderstanding of my views. I assure you that I didn’t mean to convey that human rights aren’t important because I certainly believe they are and I didn’t mean to convey that the US and China deal with these issues similarly because they certainly don’t. I am an American who has lived my whole life in the US, experiencing the American Dream, and I believe in our system. At the same time, I have spent more than half my life in contact with China which has helped me understand their system as well. In trying to answer Andrew's questions, I was attempting to explain what a Chinese leader told me about how they think about governing – about how Confucianism is based on the family and that extends into their governance, which is a more autocratic approach that is like a strict parent. I was not expressing my own opinion or endorsing that approach. My overriding objective is to help understanding. Understanding and agreeing are two different things, and that’s what was lost in the interview. I'm sorry my answer lacked that nuance and caused confusion. 

I also want to clarify how I weigh the pros and cons of investing in China in light of the human rights issue. This is not a challenge that Bridgewater alone faces. There are more than 40,000 investors and an untold numbers of banks and companies from the US and other countries facing the same issue. While commercial considerations are part of the equation, they are not paramount. It is a reality that many Americans and Chinese are intertwined, and that separating them would be terrible for just about everyone. Besides the direct functional synergies of producing things together that benefit Americans, Chinese, and the rest of the world, these connections produce mutual understandings and mutual influences that promote peace and progress globally. So, we have responsibilities to different constituencies that we have to balance, creating complex nuances for a broad number of stakeholders. In Bridgewater's case, we invest in about 40 countries, and our clients rely on us to invest in the best possible ways in all the countries that make sense from an investment standpoint. For Bridgewater, and for all of those who deal with China and many other countries, there are many other geopolitical and regulatory issues that are constantly changing and are beyond our capacity to weigh against the responsibilities we have to our clients. We want to get these things right, not just based on what we think, but, much more importantly, based on what the regulators think is right. These considerations lead us to rely most heavily on the guidance of both the US government and the governments of the countries we are in.  

Having said all this, what I think and what Bridgewater does are of minuscule importance relative to the rapidly growing risk of US war with China due to misunderstandings and inclinations to fight, so I hope that thoughtful attention will be paid to that issue and that mutual understandings will increase and inclinations to fight will diminish. I have comprehensively expressed my concerns about what is happening now and the historical precedents for it in my book, so these thoughts are available to you if you care to read them. I should point out that they are not just my own – I know that speaking out publicly on these issues can be uncomfortable, and there are many like-minded thought leaders who share these views, even if they don't speak about them as openly as I do.