Pushing for improved accounting standards at overseas listed Chinese companies makes sense. Ejecting them from US exchanges for not meeting exact US standards does not.
First, this is not a corporate matter. The China Securities Regulatory Commission has long limited access to America’s accounting oversight body. Affected companies caveat financial reports by acknowledging the US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s “inability to inspect audit work and practices of accounting firms in China”.
Delisting them all is impractical. There are 230 Chinese companies worth about $1.8tn listed in the US, reckons the Peterson Institute for International Economics. More are in the pipeline. That includes a $2bn offering from KE, a realty company backed by Chinese tech giant Tencent. Many of are so big they feature in indices tracked by fund managers. Alibaba, which dominates China’s tech sphere alongside Tencent, boasts a 0.9 per cent weighting in the widely followed MSCI all country world index.