Here are the A-shares (only available in Mainland China to Chinese national) and the H-shares (available to anyone and traded in Hong Kong). As you can see, it's getting hammered in Hong Kong.
China’s population time bomb is about to explode msn.com Since the pandemic hit, Chinese social media have been full of nihilistic, disaffected exchanges between young people about the gap behind Xi’s fabricated ‘China Dream’ and their own hopeless existence. No amount of state censorship has stifled this. The realities are stark. Last year, 11.6 bn Chinese graduates tried to enter the workforce. One in five is likely to remain unemployed. Others who did find work are victims to an obsolete ethic of unrewarded hard work and sacrifice. They prefer to do the bare minimum and abandon vain hopes of career advancement, an approach known as “lying flat”. In his 2024 New Year message, Xi Jinping stated that the post-Covid Chinese economy had “sustained the momentum of recovery” and that all Chinese people, including in Taiwan, should share in the “glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. Both these leaden phrases are fantasy. However confident Xi may feel in his autocratic grip on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he seemingly lacks both the vision and means to reverse China’s slide into a classic middle-income trap. The CCP’s expected economic bounce-back after the pandemic has not materialised; IMF forecasts are bleak. For 60 years, the Chinese population grew; we now learn it is beginning to contract. The death rate last year was the highest since 1974, when China was wracked by the chaos of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. But even more alarming, the 2023 birth rate fell by 5.7%, the lowest recorded in CCP history. China’s workforce is shrinking and its population aging. There are now 280 million CCP citizens aged 60 or over. Rather than Xi’s vaunted glorious rejuvenation, a massive demographic time bomb in China is ticking. How did this develop, and will Xi be able to defuse it? Around 1980, the CCP decided that the rate of population growth was harmful and launched mandatory birth planning measures known as the ‘One Child Policy’. Negative incentives and coercive force were then used to drive down birth rates for more than 30 years. By degrees it became clear that things had gone very wrong. Traditional patriarchal bias resulted in widespread selective female abortion, infanticide and abandonment. In China there are now 110 males for every 100 females, amounting to some 34 million ‘excess’ males. The productive labour and taxes of one young worker now have to boost the state pensions of 4 retired relatives. The number of retired CCP citizens will increase more than 30% in the next decade. The current pension system simply cannot handle this. In response, the CCP has recently adopted policies intended to encourage the young generation to have more children. However it’s proving much more difficult to achieve this than it was to bully people to have less. A measure of Xi’s desperation is his de facto order last May that China’s 2 million military personnel must take part. The rest of the population are unimpressed by the various material incentives to increased fertility. Like it or not, following Xi’s prolonged, ineffective Zero Covid lockdown the young people of China are increasingly inclined to passive resistance to the Party’s transactional interference in their private lives. Since the pandemic hit, Chinese social media have been full of nihilistic, disaffected exchanges between young people about the gap behind Xi’s fabricated ‘China Dream’ and their own hopeless existence. No amount of state censorship has stifled this. The realities are stark. Last year, 11.6 bn Chinese graduates tried to enter the workforce. One in five is likely to remain unemployed. Others who did find work are victims to an obsolete ethic of unrewarded hard work and sacrifice. They prefer to do the bare minimum and abandon vain hopes of career advancement, an approach known as “lying flat”. Xi has singled this idea out for strong criticism but has nothing to offer in return. Worse still, in one speech he told the young five times to toughen up and learn to “eat bitterness”. They are not the least impressed by his exhortation to ‘seek self-inflicted hardships’ in the new economic normal. Increasingly, Chinese people realise that their leaders have abandoned all pretence of a reliable social contract in justification for single-party rule. Neither they, nor the free citizens of Taiwan, have the least faith in talk of China’s “glorious rejuvenation”. Both sides of the Straits can see that the emperor in Beijing now has no clothes. Matthew Henderson is an associate fellow at the Council on Geostrategy
The markets here are being inflated to bubble levels by nothing else but the pathetic hype of AI ..... so why can't China do the same thing. Find a few AI tech companies like we have here (magnificent 7) and just Pump up a handful of stocks to turn their markets around ....so easy to do, we do it here every day. Just pump nvda msft amazn apple and like magic everything goes green!
Xi should take a page out of the state of Texas' playbook: Ban abortion under any circumstances, no exceptions.
2024 Begins With Stock Market Slide foreignpolicy.com Chinese stock markets are in sharp decline this year, driven by the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, government mismanagement, and a decades-long inflation of the property bubble. In January so far, mainland China’s CSI 300 Index has dropped by 6 percent, the Shanghai Composite Index has dropped by 7 percent, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index—where most large Chinese firms are listed—has fallen by more than 12 percent, reaching its lowest level in two decades. China is attempting to stabilize the yuan in response. The slide has dampened Beijing’s recent efforts to paint a rosy picture of economic recovery. The government reports that China’s GDP grew by 5.2 percent in 2023, a low figure compared with its decades of high growth but a respectable one. But analysts outside China aren’t so sure, with skeptics at Rhodium Group and elsewhere estimating last year’s GDP growth at as low as 1.5 percent. China’s usual official data fudging seems to have been especially prevalent last year. The gulf between China’s official optimism and the rest of the world’s pessimism is at the root of the stock market slide, which is mostly fueled by an unprecedented sell-off by foreign investors that started in the second half of 2023 and has picked up speed this year. Unlike Chinese institutions, foreign investors cannot be pressured by the government not to sell shares. (Such restrictions are common, adding to the Chinese stock market’s broad lack of credibility.) Stock markets are not as significant to the Chinese economy as in the West; only a fraction of household wealth is invested in stocks, and the markets suffered dramatic vicissitudes in 2015 and 2016 without much impact on the wider economy But the most critical barometer for China’s economy—the property market—is doing just as badly. New home prices and property investment both fell in 2023 and are still sliding, while new home sales are even worse, falling by 34 percent last year compared with 2022. None of this means that the Chinese economy overall is on the brink of collapse. But the psychological shock of the downturn is hitting harder than it might in another country because the Chinese government and public have become used to high GDP growth in the last three decades. Although some parts of China, especially the country’s northeast, have suffered through hard times for years, for many people this shock is a new experience. One of the problems with so many years of rapid economic growth is that it made it easy to overlook the debts that were piling up. Now those debts are coming due—and prospects for future growth are looking dimmer. What does the slowdown mean on a global scale? A GDP growth rate of 3 percent a year likely puts the Chinese economy substantially behind the U.S. economy by 2050, while a 5 percent growth rate would put it ahead. For the first time in decades, the growth gap is opening up to the United States’ advantage—something that prominent Chinese international relations expert Yan Xuetong has predicted will continue in the next decade. That could mean a more cautious China or a China that convinces itself that it has to make radical moves, such as invading Taiwan, before it becomes even weaker.
Policymakers are seeking to mobilize about 2 trillion yuan ($278 billion), mainly from the offshore accounts of Chinese state-owned enterprises, as part of a stabilization fund to buy shares onshore through the Hong Kong exchange link, said the people, asking not to be identified discussing a private matter. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...k-market-rescue-package-backed-by-278-billion There is no new money to come to rescue, smart they are, not by printing.