World’s largest money manager BlackRock is shutting a China-focused offshore fund amid congressional scrutiny over its alleged role in directing U.S. dollars to blacklisted Chinese firms.
In a recent letter to shareholders, BlackRock Global Funds’ chairwoman Denise Voss said they will close the China Flexible Equity Fund over a “lack of shareholder interest” and the investment cost to keep the fund running, which she noted is “not in the best interests of shareholders.”
BlackRock intends to liquidate all assets under the fund and redeem any outstanding shares by Nov. 7. Existing shareholders have the options to switch their investments into another fund, sell back their shares ahead of the liquidation date, or receive automatic payments for the shares when the fund closes down.
Launched in October 2017, China Flexible Equity Fund has an asset value of around $21.4 million as of late August after a six-year run. It recorded a negative 16.7 percent return in 2021, a number that nearly doubled in 2022, to negative 30.5 percent.
The fund closure came just a month after the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party launched a probe into BlackRock and investment index provider MSCI regarding the alleged investments in Chinese companies the U.S. government has deemed problematic.
The two firms together facilitated investment into over 60 Chinese entities hit with U.S. sanctions over national security or human rights issues, the lawmakers said, noting their review was far from comprehensive and thus the actual number of benefited Chinese companies is likely higher. Across five funds, BlackRock has invested over $429 million in such Chinese firms against U.S. interests, according to the House committee.
Some of the top invested Chinese entities for China Flexible Equity Fund include Tencent, a Chinese state-backed tech giant that had aided Beijing in silencing dissent and spreading propaganda through its popular messaging app WeChat, as well as state-owned hydropower operator China Yangtze Power and Nari Technology, the country’s largest supplier of electric power equipment.
In a response to the congressional probe, BlackRock had told The Epoch Times that it “complies with all applicable U.S. government laws” regarding “all investments in China and markets around the world,” and noted that it is one of 16 asset managers offering U.S. index funds that invest in Chinese companies.
It didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the China fund closure.
But across the board, there are growing signs of wariness from U.S. investors toward the Chinese market. The long-hoped-for economic recovery after the regime lifted its stringent COVID-19 curbs has not happened. Instead, the country faces a slowing economy, with a sharp drop in trade, millions of young Chinese struggling to find a job, a housing crisis, and growing tensions with the United States.
In August, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to restrict U.S. investments toward China in advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum technology, and semiconductors, citing risks for U.S. national security.
For a U.S. investor, “there is nothing bigger than the current trade tensions between the U.S. and China,” Gary Dugan, chief investment officer at the UAE-based Dalma Capital, a global alternative investment platform and an avid China investor, told The Epoch Times.
China’s regulatory environment also presents increasing challenges to foreign investors. China in July officially expanded an anti-espionage law that could criminalize regular business activities. Authorities this year have also ordered a raid on Bain & Co.’s office in Shanghai and due diligence firm Mintz Group’s office in Beijing. In May, it told local operators of “critical information structure” to stop buying products from U.S. chipmaker Micron Technology.
“Increasingly, I hear from American business that China is uninvestable because it’s become too risky,” said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on Aug. 29, during an official visit to China. She said she had made 120 to 150 calls with business and labor leaders in preparing for the trip.
Foreign investors have dumped Chinese stocks at a record pace in August as China’s economy continues to decline. Data from Hong Kong’s Stock Connect trading scheme shows that sales by offshore traders on the Chinese equity market reached around some $11 billion over three weeks since Aug. 7.
Early in August, HSBC said it had cut its Chinese commercial property exposure by $5.5 billion by the end of June from last year. Standard Chartered also reduced exposure to $3 billion, down from $3.7 billion a year ago.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.