China’s ability to create world-leading tech companies will outlast a sweeping clampdown by President Xi Jinping that drove investor sentiment in the world’s second-biggest economy to the lowest level in decades, according to one of the most prominent foreign investors in the country.
“I don’t think it’s right to give up on China,” Baillie Gifford’s James Anderson told the Financial Times. “I don’t think the golden goose has been killed off at all . . . from the point of view of building companies.”
Anderson is joint manager of Baillie Gifford’s £21.2bn Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, an early investor in Amazon, Tesla and Moderna. In China, he backed food delivery app Meituan, TikTok owner ByteDance and ecommerce giant Alibaba when they were still private companies.