He was the chief economist of Morgan Stanley and his speciality is China. Why is he necessarily a paid operative of one thing or another (that's the absolute implication here). People can believe things. And anyway that's the point of argumentation, right, to have a back-and-forth of ideas? You did see he had an argument with facts, that can be proved or disproven, right?

I assume you mean the article/author, and not the person on HN who submitted the article? OP is understood to refer to the latter.