City A.M. sits down with the co-founder of activist short-selling firm J Capital Research to discuss China, its companies and whether they require closer inspection Where exactly is China heading? It’s a question asked endlessly by senior politicians and business chiefs alike.
Anne Stevenson-Yang knows the country all too well, and, like so many others, is not optimistic about its direction of travel. China’s economy has failed to properly bounce back from the pandemic and Xi Jinping shows no sign of releasing his perennially tight grip on power. “I’m afraid I have a fairly dark view,” she said.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t just shrink and become a closed, dark kingdom, the way it was in the 1970s.” Stevenson-Yang started her career in China in the 1980s as a “foreign expert” at a government magazine, before returning in the 1990s with the US-China Business Council, witnessing the ups and downs of China’s economy and politics up close. She later moved into investment research, however, co-founding activist short-selling firm J Capital Research.
She says she developed investigative skills during her early years working as a journalist – “scraping it together as journalists do”, as she puts it. “I like finding the gap between reality and reporting, and that’s something that the big banks generally don’t do,” she said. “There are plenty of people who analyse the published financial statements, but if you can go visit the factories and take pictu.
