The Chinese Fund Backing the Tech Right

J17 Capital is pretty sketchy!

The Toronto-based J17 Capital backs 8VC, Substack and Andreessen Horowitz, meaning they have a huge interest in what is called the “tech right.” 8VC is Joe Lonsdale’s firm, and Andreessen Horowitz needs no introduction.

As the brilliant Lily Lynch has been writing, this is the Silicon Valley election, and with the exception of Peter Thiel, who has mostly bowed out of direct political involvement—though both Blake Masters and JD Vance are often described as proteges—many of the big Silicon Valley players are making bets on one side or the other.

I’ll say it again, I like JD Vance and none of his opinions really strike me as very objectionable, but he is best thought of as a sort of redneck Obama. He arrived in Silicon Valley at a time when the place was trying to understand the heartland American, and became a sort of hillbilly-whisperer. None of his investments are all that successful. It’s actually the fact that he’s a social conservative that he’s there. Trump himself is personally uncommitted to the pro-life cause, and with the post-Roe situation unsettled, there needs to be a strong pro-life person next to him on the ticket.

As for the rest of Silicon Valley, their fates are still in the balance, and by the next presidential election many of them will probably be dead or in prison. The reason why is that they’re criminals or moving a lot of dirty cash. Even at the very top, Elon Musk, there’s a huge China problem, and rumors of Tesla facilities being used for drug trafficking.

One of Andreessen Horowitz’s Chinese problems is J17, which has ties to the operations of Xiao Jianhua, a Chinese mobster who is currently incarcerated there after being abducted from Hong Kong in 2017. Lauren Balik has looked into how some of this ties into Carta, the cap table tracking company. J17 is Canadian, the Alpha Square Group is an American firm also linked to the Jianhua network. Bloomberg covered them in 2022. One of their partners was rewarded for snitching on Tiananmen Square protestors, and his wife runs it now.

Jianhua was closely tied to the Chinese elite before being made an example of, and he also invested in Jack Ma’s companies. A lot like Guo Wengui, just because someone has found himself on the wrong side of the CCP, doesn’t mean they’re good. Xiao Jianhua’s business activities are substantially unhealthy, most of which have to do with washing cash.

All of this is cause for a fair bit of suspicion when it comes to the patriotic turn of the so-called “tech right.”