“It is all tears and sorrow now, when people like me look back at the stock market,” said Lu Shunxi, a stock punter since trading first began in Shanghai in November 1990. “The birth of China’s stock market gave an opportunity to novice investors who were drawn to a casino-like market to gamble and prosper.”
For a quarter of a century, Shanghai’s stock market rode on China’s economic engine, which roared along at an average of 10 per cent every year from 1994 to 2007. After the 2008 Beijing Olympics, annual growth slowed to an average clip of 7.6 per cent through 2022.
The largest nation of communists also boasted the world’s second-largest capitalist market, valued at US$13 trillion at its peak in December 2021. China was minting dollar billionaires like the fictional A Bao in Blossoms Shanghai at the rate of almost one every day in 2020, before everything came crashing down.
