"British pension funds plough more cash into China", 23 September 2021

According to a new report by Hong Kong Watch, a pro-democracy advocacy group, the amount of cash invested by Western pension funds and other institutional investors in China has hit a record high in recent months...

The report cites the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), one of the UK's largest private pension schemes, and Legal & General, Britain's biggest pensions manager, as two British firms with "problematic" investments in China.

It found that L&G's China fund was previously investing UK pensions in Zhejiang Dahua Technology, which is alleged to produce facial recognition software for the Communist Party that detects the race of individuals and alerts the police when it identifies Uighur Muslims.

L&G has since divested from Zhejiang Dahua Technology.

Meanwhile it also found that USS was heavily invested in Chinese tech giants Tencent and Alibaba, with almost £800m collectively invested in the two firms at the end of March this year. Hong Kong Watch said this undermined USS' commitment to responsible and ethical investing as "Chinese technology companies of their size cannot divorce themselves from the Chinese state which is increasingly using a mixture of surveillance and technology to oppress and target minorities within its borders"...

L&G and USS were contacted for comment.