That hiss you hear is the sound of air escaping from the Chinese stock markets.
Like many Chinese, I’m keeping an eye on the markets these days because so many experts seem to think they are in the grip of speculative mania.
Well some of that mania is hissing away. The main market indexes began to fall last week. On Monday, they collapsed 8.3 percent. By mid-day today, they were down nearly six percent.
The markets have taken quite a tumble. The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index is now down more than 20 percent since it reached a high of 4334 on May 29th. Can you understand Ouch! in Chinese?
Some Chinese are taking it as a buying opportunity. After all, the markets are still up about 30 percent on the year.
But there may be more air in that bubble.
Item: I apologize for the sudden change of appearance of the blog. A number of McClatchy foreign correspondents are launching blogs collectively in the next week, and tech people are trying to standardize the appearance. Something went wrong in the coding of this blog. We'll try to get it back to normal soon.
http://cache.tianya.cn/publicforum/Content/free/1/926643.shtml
http://vcom.dahe.cn/dhbbs/dispbbs.asp?boardID=168&ID=629562&page=1
For those of you that can read chinese.
A horrifying story about slave labors in some brick factories in Shanxi province. Move than 1000 kids were sold to factory owners and have been working over 14 hours per day. Some, according to the report, have been isolated from outside world for over 7 years. Most have been phsically abused. There is no medical assistance if you get sick, and if the slave labor dies, he will be buried like a dog.
The youngest kid is only 8 or 9 years old.
Local governents are apathetic to this and barely did anything.
Posted by: wk | June 08, 2007 at 02:12 PM