Mitt Romney is telling American voters that as president he would take a hard line on China to challenge and get back the tons of manufacturing jobs that American businesses have moved to China in the past two decades to take advantage of cheap labor. But his personal business interests and heavy investments in China, and the American jobs he literally has helped move to China and continues to do so to this day, tell an entirely different story about where he stands on China’s export juggernaut.
Romney is heavily invested in China through Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded and in which he retains a huge portion of his $250 million fortune in investments. He began leading Bain’s investments in China in the late 1990s, and Bain’s current prospectuses now tout and lure more investments to China — investments which continue to grow the fund portfolios that expand Romney’s personal wealth.
Equally telling, Bain’s prospectuses praise the very aspects of China’s manufacturing and export tactics — extraordinarily cheap labor (85 percent of western norms), government tax incentives, the country’s huge foreign reserves, and its trend lines for overtaking the U.S. economy. Yet these advantages, touted by Bain to appeal to new investors, are precisely the advantages that Romney, in his alter ego as presidential candidate, now claims from the campaign trail that he would reverse.
Do the math.
Research by a New York Times investigative team dug up and reported last week the history of a raft of transactions referenced in Romney’s 2012 campaign finance disclosure statements and other documents that illuminate Bain’s deep connections in China since at least 1998. The team found that: