James Kynge

So they're probably going big.

I mean, in terms of their hopes or expectations, whether the U.S.

will give it, that's another question entirely.

And as I said, I'm not speaking from sources.

I'm just, you know, speaking from experience on this.

To be frank, I'd never heard of Slater the Traitor, but that's a great story.

First of all, I just want to echo what you said about this study.

This really is a groundbreaking study, and we're going to be linking to that study in the show notes.

Just let me call out the name of the lead author, Luke Levin, who is Director General of the European Central Bank's Research Department, and he's connected with Jenny Bai,

from Georgetown and Hongru and Yaojunke from the Nanyang Technological University.

And they have gone into 160,000-odd cases—it's a dataset that big—of firms that have done acquisitions in 159 countries.

So this is why I think we're highlighting this.

It's truly comprehensive.

And what they discovered is that Chinese investors, these are Chinese companies acquiring other companies, mostly in Europe or the US.

They have amassed about 3.3 trillion US dollars in global corporate assets.

So first of all, the size of China's acquisition of tech companies all over the world has been a lot bigger than we previously knew.

3.3 trillion is a massive number.

And then the second really extraordinary thing about this study is that the way they managed to do this was to look into the operations of Chinese companies that are registered in tax havens.

like the Cayman Islands, for instance.

And normally the thing about tax havens is that they're all secret.