China is erecting walls to prevent money, technology and companies from leaving the country.
This week, the State Council, China’s cabinet, announced new rules requiring national security screening for Chinese companies seeking to invest overseas. The move follows regulations introduced in April that allowed the authorities to intervene when foreign companies tried to relocate supply chains out of China.
Taken together, the measures amount to a new blueprint for the economic fortress China is building around its technology and supply chains amid rising tensions with Europe and the United States.
The rules are another sign that the economic principles of open markets and free trade, which have governed much of the world for decades and helped fuel China’s extraordinary rise, are giving way to a more fragmented era.
From Washington to Brussels, the world’s largest economies are choosing trade barriers over greater economic integration, driven in part by heightened concerns over China’s global dominance in raw materials, manufactured goods and technology, and a surge in Chinese products around the world.
“We’ve moved away from a world where laws made it easier to allow the flow of capital, people, technology and trade to go around,” said Ben Kostrzewa, a partner and trade expert at Hogan Lovells in Hong Kong.
“The Chimerica economy envisioned 20 years ago turned out to be chimerical,” he said, referring to the once-popular portmanteau of China and America.
