US firms continue to 'grow, invest in China'
Despite talk of decoupling, United States companies are not pulling out of China, and many are deepening their partnerships with Chinese businesses, Sean Stein, president of the US-China Business Council, said in Washington on Wednesday.
"There's a myth out there — fed partly by the media and partly by the political mood — that American companies are somehow leaving the China market or stepping away from it. That is absolutely not the case," Stein told reporters ahead of a meeting with a Chinese business delegation.
There have been reports highlighting companies reducing exposure or rethinking their strategy in China. Media such as The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Forbes have documented companies cutting investment plans, shifting some production to Southeast Asia, and slowing expansion amid costs, tariffs and geopolitical risk.
However, recent US media reports, including those from Bloomberg, Politico and the New York Post, have said that US companies will stay put despite tariffs, and that businesses continue operating because of scale, supply-chain depth and consumer demand.
Stein said US companies remain firmly rooted in China, noting that some of them "have been in China for 50 years, and they're not going anywhere" and, like businesses worldwide, they are reassessing supply-chain resilience.
"Companies are continuing to grow and invest in China," he said. "But they're also building options elsewhere in the region."
The 2025 Member Survey report, released by Stein's organization in July, found no exodus of US companies from China, with more than 80 percent continuing to invest to serve the local market and nearly all saying they cannot remain globally competitive without their China operations.
At the same time, some companies are recalibrating supply chains, pursuing "China-plus-one "strategies with expansion into Southeast Asia, India and Mexico, a shift driven by tariffs, higher input costs and the need for more resilient networks, according to the survey.
