Chinese Fault Beijing Over Foreign Reserves
HONG KONG — It is not just many Americans who are upset about the Standard & Poor’s downgrade of United States debt. A lot of people in China are angry, too. But they are aiming their venom at the Chinese government.
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Chinese stock markets fell Monday as investors worried that events in America and Europe would weaken demand for Chinese exports, like clothing made at this factory in Anhui Province.
Mark/European Pressphoto Agency
Investors watched monitors at a trading center in Shenyang, northeast China, on Monday.
Chinese Internet sites lit up over the weekend with criticism of Beijing’s management of the country’s foreign reserves — a usually esoteric subject that had attracted little public attention.
But the S.& P. action hit a nerve. The ambitions of the Chinese people, eager to take their part as consumers in their nation’s economic success story, have in many ways been stifled by their government’s fiscal and monetary policies.
China’s stock market plunged Monday, as investors worried that recent events in the United States and Europe would weaken demand for Chinese exports. The Shanghai A-share stock market closed down 3.78 percent and was the third-worst performer in Asia on Monday, trailing only markets in Taiwan and South Korea.
“The United States’ sovereign credit rating suffered a downgrade, why did we become the biggest victim?” one microblogger wrote on Sina Weibo, one of the more popular sites, which had hundreds of such postings. “China is always bowing to the United States, when will China really rise up and cast aside its constant fear of the United States’ reactions!”
Many of the Internet postings were similarly nationalistic, questioning whether the government had acted in China’s best interests by investing about half of the country’s $3.2 trillion worth of foreign reserves in United States Treasury securities. No other country’s government comes even close to such an outflow.
“On the question of U.S. debt, China’s strategic decision makers are pigs, they would rather let the people’s money be used by others than let the money be used by their own people,” said one posting over the weekend. The comment soon disappeared, presumably removed by censors.
And for some fun sent in from Edgar yesterday