Is investing in China worth the risks? For Ray Dalio, who has spent 40 years nurturing his Beijing connections, the answer is easy.
Illustration by Luis Grañena
Ray Dalio, the founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund, spends a lot of time contemplating what he deems the China “riddle.”
“How is it that a communist country can be so capitalist that they have the second largest capital market in the world, produce billionaires, and simultaneously be Marxist?” he asks from his Connecticut home, where The Wire reached him by Zoom. “If you don’t know how to answer that riddle, then you must not understand China.”
Dalio, 72, believes he understands China better than most. Since first visiting the country in 1984, on an invitation from China CITIC Bank, he has cultivated a rolodex that extends to the highest echelons of China’s political and corporate classes, giving him insight, he says, into “how China works, who to trust and who not to trust.”
His firm, Bridgewater Associates, has been investing billions from Chinese clients outside of the country for years, but in 2018, it launched its first onshore Chi
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