12/3/21, 12:11 PM Ray Dalio’s China Equivalence - WSJ

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OPINION
|
REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Ray Dalio’s China Equivalence

The investor’s comments show why so many Americans dislike Wall Street.

By
The Editorial Board
Dec. 2, 2021 6:42 pm ET

Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio

PHOTO: BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS

American political attitudes toward China’s Communist Party regime have changed
dramatically in the past half-decade, and for good reason. But some on Wall Street are still
living in the 1990s.

Bridgewater founder
Ray Dalio
was especially tone-deaf in a CNBC appearance this week.
Asked about his investments in China and Beijing’s human-rights abuses, the billionaire
drew an equivalence with the U.S. “I look at the United States, and I say, well, what’s going
on in the United States and should I not invest in the United States” because of “our own
human-rights issues, or other things?”

Mr. Dalio acknowledged that China has “an autocratic system” (an improvement from
Michael Bloomberg’s
2020 claim that Chinese President
Xi Jinping
is “not a dictator”).
But pressed on China’s policy of “disappearing people,” he added, “that is their approach,

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12/3/21, 12:11 PM Ray Dalio’s China Equivalence - WSJ

we have our approach.” Tell that to publisher

Jimmy Lai,
who is locked in jail merely for
asking China to live up to the promises it made about Hong Kong autonomy.

This is the sort of comment that sours Americans on Wall Street and opens executives to
accusations of being “citizens of the world” before they are Americans. Mr. Dalio wants
freedom to invest where he pleases, but if Wall Street titans convey contempt for
America’s system of government, then voters will curtail their prerogatives through the
political process.

It’s true that many U.S. firms invest in authoritarian countries, and investors don’t need
to go out of their way to make moral pronouncements about every one of them. But China
of 2021 is not the China of 1995. It’s a harsh authoritarian regime, with extraordinary state
and technological power backing it up as it directly threatens U.S. interests and individual
liberty on the global stage.

Mr. Dalio can lawfully invest in China if he chooses, but he wouldn’t be as successful as he
is without the American rule of law and property rights. If he can’t make a principled
distinction between the governments of China and the U.S., he has a moral blind spot and
he isn’t worth listening to as a business sage.

Appeared in the December 3, 2021, print edition.

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