|
|
|
Chinese
Investors Dislike Market Regulation (Continued from the previous
page) In a market highly sensitive to regulatory activities like China's, investors' accumulated losses after the year-long strong regulatory efforts are easily transformed into a sentiment against further such efforts. "I hate companies cooking their books or manipulating share prices. But I don't understand why the regulators made us, investors, suffer," said Mrs. Liu, "We didn't do anything wrong." Shortly after February, furious investors criticized reform-minded regulators, especially those from overseas, for blindly copying other markets' regulatory efforts, with little respect to China's unique situation. "China's stock market has many chronic diseases, which can not be cured overnight," said Mr. Zhang who stood outside the same brokerage house as Ms. Liu did when she suffered her loss of $12,489. Zhang was a middle-aged worker who has recently been laid off. But he said he had long ignored the meager payment he received from his state employer, a rubber tire factory, because he could make his living by speculating in the stock market. It is not the lay-off, but the recent loss of $20,000 in the last year that made him panic. "That loss almost wiped off my years of gains in stock market," Zhang said. He used Chinese word "winning" in explaining his gains over the years, as if he was talking about buying lottery. And he, too, believed regulatory efforts caused market downturn and threw hundreds of thousands of small speculators, like him, out of the market. "Investors in China rarely see the market as an investment tool.
They see it as a big casino,"said Wu Jinglian, an economist at Development
and Research Center of State Council. "The regulators shouldn't allow market free falling," added Zhang in a furious gesture. His words echoed those critics who often set regulatory efforts against development of the market and claimed that regulators'cracking down on irregularities invariably causes market volatility and sabotages investor confidence. In fact, regulators who used to be praised as "sticklers for fighting corruption" are now being attacked as "people who want to dampen the market in order to reap huge profits when the shares are cheap", some Chinese investors said in online chat rooms. Regulators like Laura Cha ignored such criticism. "Development and regulation are two different things. I don't see why regulation will contradict with the market's development. My job is to maintain the market's credibility," said Luara Cha in a recent interview in Beijing. However, on the political spectrum, a recent stock market seminar in Beijing highlighted the divergence among officials in supporting heavy-handed regulation. In an effort seen as cheering up the market, four former CSRC chairmen coincidentally made speeches saying the development of market should be the priority under any circumstance. Three official business newspaper published their speeches in the front page the next day, splashing headlines like "Development Is The Most Important Thing In The Market". Almost all the indexes stopped declining and gained slightly at closing on that day. "With such a change in official rhetoric, you can't help but think 'Is this voice for development going to outweigh regulatory efforts'," said Wang Shuo, vice managing editor of Caijing magazine, a magazine famous for its disclosures of corruption in China's stock market. END |
