FT: UBS is hiring editors to screen its reports in China for potential offensiveness

The Swiss bank UBS is hiring special employees who will check all research published by the bank’s analysts in China for possible offensiveness and controversy in the region. Writes regarding it Financial Times. As the newspaper notes, a top manager of another large bank has already called it “self-censorship.”

The FT writes that UBS’s asset management division posted jobs for technical editors in July. According to the job description, they must ensure that the “language, tone, and content” of all reports published in Chinese are “appropriate and follow all regulatory and internal rules,” and that such publications do not contain anything potentially offensive. and ambiguous. According to the FT, UBS has already hired such an employee in Hong Kong and continues to hire in Singapore. UBS declined to comment on this information. At the same time, an FT source in the bank noted that other banks operating in China are also hiring such editors, just with a different title.

Western banks are regularly at the center of scandals in China. UBS itself found itself in this situation in 2019. At the time, Paul Donovan, senior local bank economist, when discussing the possible impact of swine flu on rising prices, wrote: “Does it matter? It does if you are a Chinese pig. It does if you like to eat pork in China.” After that, Mr. Donovan was criticized in China, considering his comment as racist. He was suspended from work for several months, later he was reinstated following an apology. Last year JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon had to apologize for a joke regarding the Chinese Communist Party.

Yana Rozhdestvenskaya