Chinese Investors Express New Angst
Like many Chinese people, Jacky hoped that he could make enough money investing in China’s stock markets to help pay for an apartment in a big city. But in 2015 he lost $30,000, and in 2021 he lost $80,000. After that, he shut down his trading account and started investing in Chinese funds that track stocks in the United States.
Chinese investors’ main vehicle, so-called A shares of Chinese companies, fell more than 11 percent in 2023, and the losses have continued. Many investors have instead flocked to the exchange-traded funds that track foreign markets.
Putting money in stocks is inherently risky. But in addition to financial losses in the markets, Chinese are also experiencing declines in home values and a government that does not want any public discussion of what is going on.
The investors recently found a way to vent that would not be quickly censored. They started leaving comments on an innocuous post about giraffe conservation on the official Weibo social media account of the U.S. Embassy in China. They lamented the poor performance of their portfolios and revealed their broader despair. The giraffe post has been liked nearly one million times since February 2, much more than what the embassy’s Weibo posts usually get. Many of the comments also offered admiration for the United States.
“Their reactions are more than about losing money in the markets,” said Jacky, an analyst in manufacturing who is earning half of what he did two years ago and juggling several jobs. “The venting probably serves as an outlet for their accumulated frustrations in life.”
Another investor, Leo, a portfolio manager in Beijing, has been investing in China’s stock markets for nearly a decade. In November, he started closing out his positions. Now, like Jacky, he is placing his bets on overseas markets.
Jacky and Leo used their English names for fear of reprisal.
Jacky, in his mid-30s, lost his job at a private equity firm in 2022. He took a deep pay cut when he moved back to manufacturing. He fears he is “on the verge of falling off a cliff.”
Leo, who was born in Beijing in the mid-1980s, said the first crack in his confidence was in 2021 when the government went after internet companies.
The second crack appeared when the government abruptly ended its “zero-Covid” policy in December 2022 without effective vaccines or medications. Then in July, Beijing’s efforts to stimulate the economy failed.
When a group of Leo’s high school classmates met in June, he said, they could not believe that two of them were migrating to Canada. When they met again recently, he found that a few of his classmates had opened bank accounts in Hong Kong, which has banks that are connected to the global financial system. They asked him how to convert their savings in renminbi to U.S. dollars and transfer them to Hong Kong.
“They’re preparing for the worst-case scenarios,” he said.