BREAKING 🚨: Japan Japan's 30-Year Yield just ripped above 4.18%, the highest level in history 🤯 👀 Dear God!

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Having recently traded China A shares myself, my impression was that the market is far too easily moved, and even manipulated, by absurd rumors. At the time, I held a leading Chinese CCL stock. One day, a rumor circulated that Chinese securities regulators were investigating a fund for allegedly manipulating CCL related stocks. As a result, a stock that had been up nearly 7% intraday quickly gave back all its gains and fell back to around flat. But after local Chinese media looked into the matter, the rumor was found to be false. A shares are far too vulnerable to rumors. I no longer trade China A shares.

China’s retail sales — a nominal figure — grew just 0.2% in April, marking the weakest reading on record outside the Covid era. Investor pessimism about consumption has become deeply entrenched: the underperformance of consumer-oriented sectors relative to the broader market has now widened to the largest gap in history. “Nobody wants to touch anything tied to consumption.” That is, broadly speaking, the prevailing sentiment among onshore investors.

Sharing a new piece by me and my colleague @shuizaiping2 where we took a deep dive into Xi Jinping’s newly released book on the “correct view of political performance”, a compilation of his speeches spanning more than a decade, many of them previously unpublished! The timing, obviously, is no accident. Ahead of the Two Sessions, Beijing is clearly trying to push a shift beyond GDP worship and redefine what counts as bureaucratic success. In fact Xi has long been frustrated with his bureacrats. He complained about officials who “rack up a mountain of debt, pat their butts, and walk away,” chasing short-term growth at long-term cost. He is equally frustrated with the cadres’ lack of motivation: “some officials won’t lift a finger until the Central Committee issues a written directive… Are you telling me that if I don’t personally issue a directive, the work just grinds to a halt?!” So what’s the new, better KPI, according to Xi? Our takeaway: it’s a trilemma. From Xi’s speeches, good cadres should be expected to deliver 3 things all at once: strict political loyalty / compliance; new + better quality growth through technological upgrading eg “new quality productive forces”; systemic security (avoiding risks + containing those accumulated over the past decade.) The problem? Each of these priorities makes sense on its own. But together, they create a bureaucratic trilemma in which officials can realistically satisfy only two of the three. Is there a way to escape the trilemma? We offer some thoughts...

Observers fret that Xi Jinping is returning China to Marxism; few notice that, perhaps unwittingly, he has made it a partial tax haven economist.com/leaders/2026/0…