China’s ‘national team’ state funds intervene amid market rout

China’s “national team” of huge state funds has injected billions of dollars into stocks to arrest a weekslong slide, as the country’s flagging markets officially entered bear territory. Coming days before the Communist Party’s Fifth Plenum, the intervention may have helped “prop up the market,” a Chinese financial commentator said, but “it couldn’t prop up investors’ confidence.” Particularly stinging is the rout of Chinese AI and tech firms, which leader Xi Jinping has positioned as the new productive engines of the country’s modern economy. “Increasingly, Xi’s starry vision of an AI-enabled economy is colliding head-on with structural realities,” Semafor’s China columnist wrote, including “a shrinking workforce, rising debt, [and] mounting geopolitical tensions.”