Ray Dalio took to social media on Sunday to say that his views on China had been misunderstood after he had “sloppily answered” a question about his investments in China during an interview on CNBC last week.
The billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, who had compared China to a “strict parent” when asked about the disappearance of dissidents, said he didn’t mean to downplay the importance of human rights issues but was “attempting to explain” the Chinese approach to governing as an extension of Confucian ideas about family.
“I was not expressing my own opinion or endorsing that approach,” Dalio said on platforms including Twitter and Linkedin. “My overriding objective is to help understanding. Understanding and agreeing are two different things, and that’s what was lost in the interview.”
Republican senator Mitt Romney called Dalio’s investments in China “a sad moral lapse” while the chief executive officer of Dalio’s own firm has told employees he disagrees with the billionaire’s views on the issue.
Dalio added that he does weigh the pros and cons of investing in China with the consideration of human rights issue, probably the same factors the more than 40,000 investors, along with banks and companies in the world’s second-biggest economy, grapple with.
“It is a reality that many Americans and Chinese are intertwined, and that separating them would be terrible for just about everyone,” he said, adding that he raised the issues in hopes that the U.S.-China tensions will diminish.
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