It is well known that China's leadership tends not to take life with humor.

After the new president Xi Jinping visited the United States in 2013, the censors erased any comparison between the head of state and the plump cartoon character Winnie the Pooh.

The bear can still be seen in Shanghai's Disneyland.

But when about 25-year-old Luo Daiqing, who was studying in America, traveled to his parents' home in Wuhan for the summer vacation in July 2019, he was arrested and later sentenced to 6 months in prison because he compared Xi with the bear Pooh in tweets and made a loud voice Verdict had "insulted the country leader".

Hendrik Ankenbrand

Business correspondent for China based in Shanghai.

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According to this logic, the leadership in Beijing would have to take the joke by JP Morgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon as an attack, which he cracked on Tuesday at an event at Boston College when he spoke about the bank's business in China: " I made a joke that the Communist Party is celebrating its 100th birthday.

Like JP Morgan.

I bet we'll be around longer. "

It was not the only comment by the American bank chief, notorious for his loose tongue, that the CP might not have liked.

Dimon also said that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could become a "Vietnam" for the People's Republic and lead to "body bags", analogously to resistance in the Chinese population to military intervention.

No comment from the tour yet

Both - the Communist Party remaining in the leadership and an attack on Taiwan - are politically more sensitive in China than any other issue. For many observers it is therefore inexplicable that the JP Morgan Chase boss of all people dealt with them with a loose tongue at a public event. As recently as August, the bank was the first foreign financial institution to receive approval from Beijing to hold 100 percent of the shares in its business in China without local coercive partners. JP Morgan Chase wants to earn a lot of money in particular with the private wealth business with China's rich, which is under particular scrutiny in the face of increasingly anti-capitalist rhetoric from Beijing.

The bank currently has approximately $ 20 billion in loans and other land-related risks on its books. A week ago, the Hong Kong government allowed Jamie Dimon to fly into the financial center and meet employees without going into the mandatory three-week quarantine - which even Mark Tucker, chief executive of HSBC, UK, suffered during his visit to Hong Kong in August .

So far, China's leadership has not officially commented on Dimon's comment.

Shen Yi, a scientist at Shanghai's elite Fudan University and a popular blogger in China with 1.5 million followers, criticized the banker on Wednesday as "arrogant" and sneered that he was no longer interested in JP Morgan's banking license in China.

There is little doubt in Shanghai's financial market that this can actually be quickly withdrawn again if Beijing believes it needs less foreign capital than it is currently in the crisis on China's real estate market.