Financiers’ pronouncements on China do not match their actions

Hong Kong brands itself “Asia’s world city”, a label that has been mostly deployed in mockery over the past three years of political suppression and pandemic-induced isolation. Yet the city’s government would like to make the slogan true once again. It had hoped the Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit, which welcomed financial bigwigs on November 2nd, would advertise the once semi-autonomous city’s return to the world. Instead, the event turned into another symbol of the headaches facing Western investors in China. Mainland bankers, with whom chief executives would have hobnobbed, could not attend without ten days of quarantine on their return home. American lawmakers urged executives not to go, citing China’s human-rights record.