Jim Cramer Says Chinese Regime is Gunning for American Investors: ‘This is Stalinist’

CNBC host Jim Cramer advised investors on Friday to stop buying shares in Chinese companies listed in the United States, saying the country’s regime was using them to undermine them to undermine Western investors.

His comments came after the announcement by Chinese regulators that educational institutions in the country would be banned from raising money through stock listings. Shares in Chinese education companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange — TAL Education and New Oriental Education and Technology — fell by more than 50 percent by afternoon trading hours. Shares in other Chinese companies — including Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent Music — similarly fell by single-digit percentages, even as the rest of the market inched upward.

“They are killing us,” Cramer said in a segment with Andrew Ross Sorkin. “They know that we own these stocks, and they’re showing no mercy. … It’s very malice. It’s Stalinist. We tend not to see that. I think these are very serious violations that make us realize capitalism is not alive in China. We kidded ourselves that we thought the party was somehow going to want to join the rest of the world in being capitalist. They’re not. This is a dictatorship.

“I question every one of those companies,” he added. “Any one of them could be vulnerable. You’ve got to go. You can’t own these stocks. I mean, the party may decide tomorrow that Alibaba is charging people too much. So I don’t know. I think we’re discovering that they’re communists, but they were communist all along.”

Friday’s announcement in China comes amid a broader effort by its ruling Communist Party to crack down on companies becoming listed on Western stock exchanges. The country’s regulators also proposed a rule this month that would require companies with data on more than 1 million users to seek approval prior to seeking stock listings abroad. That move was seemingly aimed at TikTok parent-company ByteDance, which quickly halted a plan for an offshore IPO.

Watch above via CNBC.