In recent months, having been encouraged by the state, millions of ordinary Chinese have put themselves at risk of losing everything by gambling in the stock market. The catastrophic results are unfolding daily. Actually, since its inception, China’s stock market has been under the control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that has regarded the market as a kind of “ATM” for filling the coffers of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and lining the pockets of their CEOs, while draining the savings from small speculators.
During his term in office, former Premier Zhu Rongji stated, “The stock market needs to help lift SOEs out of poverty.” The CCP set a goal of pulling SOEs out of poverty within three years via use of the stock market. It then went about it by listing a group of poorly managed, and even unsustainable, SOEs on the stock market. With this direction, stock reform and listing of stocks was limited to SOEs for a long time, while privately owned enterprises had little chance of obtaining any public funding.
