Communist China is becoming an ever-greater threat to the United States, its people and vital interests. To add insult to injury, the growing capacity of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to attack this country and its allies around the world and to repress its own citizens at home and those of nations it is colonizing abroad is being financed by American investors.
Public pension funds and other institutional investors as well as individuals are – most often unwittingly – pouring billions of dollars into the coffers of Chinese state-controlled companies closely tied to the CCP and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) through the U.S. capital markets. Among the PRC’s corporations listed or traded on these exchanges are ones enabling Beijing to: violate U.S. sanctions; illegally build and militarily fortify islands in the South China Sea; monitor, incarcerate and repress its own and other nations’ religious minorities and ordinary citizens; engage in surveillance state practices, digital totalitarianism and “social credit” scoring; conduct cyber attacks and intellectual property theft; and construct advanced weapon systems with which to inflict murderous damage on this country and its men and women in uniform.
Scores of millions of us are unknowingly underwriting such companies, directly or indirectly, through the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) All-Country World Index. There is at least $6 trillion that investors passively invest in this benchmarked index, which has 6% percent of its portfolio invested in the stocks of Communist China’s corporations. It will shortly go to 7%, or an increase of $60 billion.
Worse yet, starting next year, due to a decision by the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, the federal retirement system’s Thrift Savings Plan, with its over half-a-trillion dollars under management, is set to “mirror” this particular MSCI index. If that is permitted to happen, some 5.7 million U.S. government employees – past and present, military and civilian – who hold any international stocks in portfolio will be compelled to have their pension dollars underwrite these types of malevolent Chinese Communist Party enterprises. It is totally unacceptable to oblige, for example, our veterans and those serving in uniform today to invest in Chinese companies building weapons designed to kill them or their comrades-in-arms. It is equally unacceptable to have champions of human rights unwittingly funding, for example, concentration camps holding over one million Uyghurs and many Tibetans.
We call on President Trump and the Congress to take such steps as are required to prevent the Thrift Savings Plan from being used to finance those corporate instruments of an adversary state that seeks to extinguish our freedoms and everything we hold dear as a nation.