Ahead of the 20th National Congress of CPC to be held in 2022 where President Xi Jinping is all set to secure his third term in power, Chinese authorities are enforcing Xi’s “common prosperity” agenda by warning foreign banks to trim wages.
Chinese regulators have warned global major investment banks including Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and UBS not to reward their top bankers too lavishly, the country’s latest effort to rein in risks and promote “common prosperity,” reported The Standard, a Hong Kong publication.
Xi has continued to call for the common prosperity of the country’s entire population amid the massive crackdown on big tech giants in China.
The China Securities Regulatory Commission had summoned executives to discuss bankers’ pay, people familiar with the meetings said, characterizing the discussions as a highly unusual, if not unprecedented, regulatory intrusion into foreign banks’ personnel decisions.
It’s a sign that they are being put on the same footing as local brokers, who were told in the past two years to cut pay and expenses, reported The Standard.
Executives in attendance, which included Credit Suisse’s local Chairman Janice Hu and Goldman’s China co-head Sean Fan, were told by top regulators to keep compensation, especially for senior managers, in line with the “common prosperity” agenda.
The say-on-pay meetings, reported here for the first time, are just one of the many potholes that global banks have hit lately on their long, rocky road into China.
Moreover, China has been targetting major companies in the country by using certain regulations.
China’s live-streamers harnessed e-commerce, social media and personal star power, to fuel the rise of a multibillion-dollar industry in recent years but the influencers are now targets in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “common prosperity” campaign, a wide-ranging crackdown that is bringing celebrities and Internet companies to heel in the name of addressing inequality.
Further, it is also an effort to inject ideological rigor into the new economy after years of explosive growth and exert more control over which industries prosper as part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s economic vision.