(The Epoch Times)—The Vanguard Group, one of the world’s largest asset managers, invests in Chinese military groups and companies linked to forced labor through index funds, a new report says. The report comes as the Treasury Department finalizes the rules pertaining to a White House executive order prohibiting certain outbound investments to China.
Vanguard’s $70 billion flagship emerging markets index fund includes 60 companies on the Chinese military company sanction list by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) under the U.S. Department of Treasury, according to the report released by the Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA) on Oct. 13. CPA is an advocacy organization representing exclusively manufacturers that have productions in the United States.
In addition, the flagship and other Vanguard funds also hold shares of eight Chinese companies sanctioned over human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region, where the persecution of Uyghurs has been identified by the U.S. State Department as “genocide.”
The report didn’t provide a tally of all Vanguard investments in Chinese military companies but listed a total of $100 million in three such groups.
While noting that Vanguard’s fund holdings are legal, CPA urged Congress to take urgent action on the “long-festering, structural problem” that “a weak public policy response by the U.S. government has allowed greed within the asset management industry to supersede urgent American investor protection, national security, and human rights concerns.”
“Congress must turn off the tap of American capital flowing to China and stop private and public market investments into blacklisted CCP-connected companies,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
“Americans do not want firms like Vanguard and BlackRock to invest their retirement savings in companies building the Chinese Communist Party’s military and implementing its ongoing genocide against the Uyghur people. If we accept the status quo, we are willfully fueling our own destruction,” he added.
Congressional scrutiny over Wall Street’s role in financing Chinese military companies has been on the rise.
Three months ago, Mr. Gallagher’s committee launched an investigation on BlackRock, another leading asset manager, and global index provider MSCI over their role in channeling money to Chinese companies involved in building weapons for the Chinese military. The committee estimated $429 million of such investment against American interests by BlackRock.
In a letter dated July 31 to BlackRock and MSCI, Mr. Gallagher and committee ranking member Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) wrote that, through the companies’ funds, Americans were “unwittingly funding” Chinese companies that fuel the CCP’s military and the two companies were “exacerbating an already significant national security threat and undermining American values.”
Two months later, BlackRock closed its China-focused offshore fund. All shareholders would have to redeem any outstanding shares by Nov. 7 before the fund’s liquidation. BlackRock previously told The Epoch Times that its products “comply with all applicable U.S. government laws” and it’s one of 16 asset managers offering U.S. index funds with investment in Chinese companies. The company didn’t directly comment on the closure of the China fund.
In an emailed response, a Vanguard spokesperson told The Epoch Times, “Vanguard maintains the highest levels of compliance with all applicable laws and regulations, including sanctions law. We welcome additional clarity from policymakers who are in a position to determine sanctions through the formal OFAC process.”
“As one of many asset managers offering investors a range of funds to invest internationally, our clients’ investments in China are primarily through U.S.-based passive index products that provide diversified exposure to many developed and emerging economies,” the spokesperson added.
In August, President Joe Biden issued an executive order (EO), prohibiting U.S. outbound investments to China in industries such as semiconductors and quantum computing. The Treasury Department has published preliminary rules, which listed index funds as excepted transactions under the EO. The public commentary period closed on Sept. 28.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Of course, but BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and Fidelity are financially structured as a single, cross–shareholding entity.
The entire investment process is a money fund transfer from the American tax base to China, a bit too abstract for many, if not most, to comprehend:
(1) Banks and hedge funds invest in offshore VIEs, or Variable Interest Entities, instead of actual stocks since NO foreigners are allowed to purchase any Chinese (PRC) stocks or bonds —- so in essence they are buying or investing in an interest in a share or bond, not the actual instruments, and these VIEs can be shut down at any time by the CCP, which they have been —— the banks and hedge funds simply write off their losses as TAX writeoffs, meaning subtracting their losses from the US TAX base, then they REINVEST one again in other VIEs!!! ★★
(2) Every time, since the 1980s onwards, a job was offshored to China (or elsewhere) it is a minus from the US tax base, they are dismantling the tax base by the mass offshoring of jobs over the decades!
In actuality, there is no real presence of Chicom companies on the US stock exchange as they exist to raise capital through extraordinary, fantasy finance means, as explained by those VIE financial constructs —— nor is there any real China real estate market, since the CCP OWNS ALL THE LAND IN CHINA: the majority is doled out – leased on a political favor basis, with smaller percentages going to rural developers.
★★ Probably not a coincidence that Marshall Carter, Jr., was a past CEO of State Street: Carter’s father was Gen. Marshall Carter, deputy director of the CIA on Nov. 22, 1963, when the US president was slaughtered in Dallas, recommended for that position by Nelaon Rockefeller. Later, Gen. Marshall would be the NSA director, when all the 1963 files for NSA station, USA–55 disappeared?!