Earlier this month, a columnist for the Indianapolis Star, Jacob Stewart, reported on how the Indiana Public Retirement System has invested over $30 million in violation of a 2023 state law requiring divestment from China.
The questioned investments seem to be all or mostly in Hong Kong.
“Separate constitution”
Stewart says that INPRS had originally told him that by its reckoning, Hong Kong operates with “a separate constitution from that of the People’s Republic of China” (September 23, 2025).
The agency must have had in mind the one country, two systems deal supposedly taking effect in 1997, the year Great Britain foolishly handed Hong Kong over to the PRC. By the terms of the agreement with China, the Hong Kong polity was supposed to survive intact for at least half a century. Some people believed that the Chinese Communist Party would abide by this. After all, it had agreed to do so.
Well, all delusions about the matter have long been swept away. After China’s imposition in 2020 of a repressive National Security Law on Hong Kong, that former British colony could no longer by any stretch of definition be regarded as governmentally separate from the People’s Republic of China. INPRS had not been keeping up with the news when it told Stewart about a “separate constitution.”
But now INPRS has said, in response to a communication from State Senator Chris Garten spurred by Stewart’s reporting, that “INPRS will now treat all Hong Kong–domiciled investments the same was any investment [based in] the People’s Republic of China” (September 19, 2025).
Garten (shown above) is the legislator responsible for the law that INPRS has been violating.
By 2030 at the latest
So INPRS admitted its mistake immediately and will fix things.
There’s a catch, though. Looks like the System may take its bloody time unloading the CCP-supporting investments. INPRS says it “will establish a plan to divest any applicable Hong Kong–domiciled investments and will complete the divestment as soon as financially prudent and no later than the time frames established in the law.”
What kind of time frames are those? “According to the law,” Stewart explains, “INPRS must entirely divest from investments within five years after they determine they are a ‘restricted entity,’ so in this case, by 2030.”
By 2030? It is Garten’s law which is primarily at fault here. Five years is a long time to be helping to fund the Chinese Communist Party. How long does it take to tell a broker: “Sell all our holdings in the following Hong Kong companies:…”?
INPRS, just turn it all into cash and then take as long as you like deciding where to put the money instead. Do it. Get it done.
