US investment ban only strengthens China's financial centers: RT news

MOSCOW  -- American investment sanctions against Chinese companies, aimed at slowing down the country's development, will not meet their goals, but strengthen China's own financial centers, an op-ed article published by Russia's RT News has said.

America's financial markets are the largest and the most lucrative in the world, but they are not "a life-or-death sentence" for many listed Chinese companies, said Tom Fowdy, a British analyst of international relations, in the Friday article, adding that "the ban will not deter third parties from investing in them."

If Chinese companies need big capital inflows, they have two safe bets to choose from: Hong Kong and Shanghai, two of the world's largest financial centers, said the article.

International confidence in China's markets is strong, it noted, and there are few actual means that can be used to stop global capital from pouring into China.

"Even if Americans cannot directly invest in these firms anymore, arguably, indirectly they still do, as they are supplementing China's financial system and markets irreversibly, illustrating how such measures in practice have very little impact," it said.

All this manages to achieve in practice, the article observed, "is to strengthen China's own financial centre prospects by lulling third-party capital away from New York City and into Shanghai and Hong Kong."