I think it must be very shocking. Often we hear that in the supply chain there's cotton made by Uighurs and they're in concentration camps. We never look into our pensions.
I think politicians on this committee work very hard to defend our values, defend Canada's values and also defend human rights. Investors, especially fund managers, are very busy investing in China. They don't need to go there. They just need to buy the stocks. They just buy the bonds.
Canada pension plan investments are huge. This is really related to our pensions. When we open the list of its stock holdings, there are 189 Chinese stocks. It's the second-largest holding after U.S. stocks, so that is quite striking.
Of course, when we talk about ESG, we single out quite a long list of companies that violate human rights. Canada's pension fund should not invest in these companies. Then, when we look into the Indo-Pacific strategy, we need to be prepared. We need to have a contingency plan. When something happens in Taiwan, not even a war, just a blockade, or this spills into the South China Sea, or even because of the crackdown on protests in China and pro-democracy, like-minded countries put sanctions on China, then what happens to Chinese stocks and Chinese bonds? Definitely they will collapse. Then we will see our pension fund lose value.
I think this is the area where the committee needs to push the government. It needs to have a proper country analysis. The government needs to work on that. What's the risk with some kind of confrontation in the Indo-Pacific region? Will that affect our pensions? Also, what sort of relationship should we have under this special risk?
Two or three years ago, nobody would think about that. At that time, it was quite fashionable to invest in China. Two or three years ago, the return was one of the highest. Then, when you look at the average return on Chinese stocks for the last two decades, it's almost zero, because it collapsed so much in the last year. The Chinese market is not the best place to put our investments.