IN-DEPTH: Biden’s World Bank Pick Has Ties to Chinese Company That Owns TikTok

President Joe Biden’s pick to lead the World Bank has business links with China.

Ajay Banga is currently the vice chairman at General Atlantic, a major investor of ByteDance. ByteDance is the Chinese company that owns TikTok, an app that has drawn heightened security concerns over its ties with the Chinese Communist Party.

During Banga’s tenure as CEO and president of Mastercard, the credit card company won approval in 2020 to join China’s $27 trillion payments market.

Additionally, Banga is a board member of Temasek, a state holding company of Singapore that has 22 percent of its investments in China.

The Treasury Department has defended Banga’s nomination, which requires the approval of the World Bank’s executive board. The position is a five-year term that is renewable. If confirmed, Banga would succeed David Malpass.

A department spokesperson told The Washington Examiner that “General Atlantic’s investment in ByteDance predates Banga’s work there.”

“From his tenure at Mastercard, Banga knows firsthand the importance of taking concrete measures to protect the data privacy of consumers,” added the spokesperson.

China Ties Alarming

Experts who spoke with The Epoch Times expressed alarm over the pick.

“If the nominee does indeed have serious ties to China then his nomination could be in trouble,” Desmond Lachman, who was deputy director in the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Policy Development and Review Department and is currently a senior fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, said in an email.

Nonetheless, said Lachman, Banga’s “nomination was a blunder and reflected a poor vetting process” and it does not indicate “that Biden is getting soft on China.”

However, the pick reflects Biden going easy on China, according to human rights and national security lawyer Irina Tsukerman.

“The news of Ajay Banga having business ties to China is far from surprising, on the contrary they are fully in line with the Biden administration’s ideology and policies,” she said in an email. “Banga’s candidacy fits the pattern of other moves and nominations.”

Banga, though, was likely picked due to his business background, stated Dan Runde, the director of the Project on Prosperity and Development at the Washington-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Runde was the head of partnerships at the International Finance Corporation, which is part of the World Bank’s umbrella organization, World Bank Group.

“I’m guessing that the Biden administration mainly picked him for a couple of reasons other than China. So they picked him because he’s an American citizen, that he has stature,” he said.

“Historically, there’s a significant bias toward what they describe as ‘bankers,’ people with some financial experience,” continued Runde, who cited Banga’s experience at Mastercard and General Atlantic. “And so they feel that this is a person who can do this role.”

‘Climate Change’ a Deciding Factor

That being said, remarked Runde, the administration