Back in the 1980s, the big fear was that Japan was buying up America. At the start of the third decade of the 21st century, the fear is that China is buying up America, a threat much more potent than Japan ever was. Unlike China, which expanded by building a better mousetrap, China’s reach is predicated upon Marxist expansionism, military and private-sector espionage, corrupt business practices, slave labor, and a large military.
Investing.com assembled a list of 76 American brands that China owns in whole or in part. (There are also companies that Hong Kong owns but China’s aggressive inroads in Hong Kong makes that something of a distinction without a difference.) Here are some of the more surprising entries in that list:
AMC Theaters, which is the largest movie chain in the world, started life in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1920, as American Multi-Cinema. From 2012 to 2018, though, China’s Dalian Wanda Group, which operates out of Beijing, was the majority stakeholder.
In 2018, Silver Lake Partners, a private equity company in Menlo Park, California, invested $600 million in AMC, which gave it 32% of Dalian’s class B common stock. However, the way the deal was structured, despite owning slightly less than 50% of the common stock, Dalian still has majority control over the board of directors. In other words, Dalian controls what movies people around the world can see.
The wrench in the works, of course, is the Wuhan virus. In October 2020, AMC reported that it was running out of money and could have no cash left by the end of 2020 or the beginning of 2021. It will be interesting to see whether Dalian uses this situation to buy out Silver Lake Partners and re-up its hold on AMC, or if AMC will become a relic of a pre-virus era, with empty theaters dotting the landscape of cities across the world.
When you buy GE appliances, you think you’re buying appliances from an American company with roots stretching back to 1892. What many of us missed is that, beginning in 2016, GE appliances, which is headquartered in Boston, became a subsidiary of Haier, a Chinese company headquartered in Qingdao, China, bought GE.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/china_has_deep_tentacles_in_the_american_economy.html
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