China: Markets stall over fears for the economy

Fresh fears about China's economic slowdown have prompted share prices to stall on the country's main markets.

The Shanghai Composite Index was up slightly at 2,995.41 in afternoon trading, after dipping by 0.3 per cent to 2,983.06 over the course of the morning. Hong Kong's Hang Seng dipped 0.1 per cent to 20,501.48, after falling 0.4 per cent earlier in the day.

Public holidays meant there was no trading in South Korea or Japan while in Australia, "bank shares outpaced the broader market", says the BBC.

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Today's flat performance could mean China's "robust market rebound" since early March is losing momentum, warns Reuters, with mounting concern the recovery could be short-lived.

Fears of a continued slump received fresh impetus from a private survey that suggests business activity "softened slightly" in April, says the BBC.

Beijing took action to address its slowing growth earlier this year, but Reuters says there are "signs" that the fresh liquidity injected into the economy by the state has only boosted property and commodity prices instead of "energising China's economic muscles".

China economic expert Arthur R Kroeber told the New York Times that government intervention could be the problem, not the solution for China's economic woes. Successful companies need "space" to develop and not to be controlled, he said.

"When the stock market crashed, rather than allowing a bust - which you should, if you really want more market forces - the government opted to intervene, ordering state firms to buy shares to keep prices artificially high," he added.

"Now it's trapped, because the state firms that bought these shares can't sell them without triggering a panic sell-off."

Kroeber also pointed to an ideological clash between President Xi Jinping and more radical thinkers over the country's exchange rate, saying the central bank wanted a "flexible rate that will help it set monetary policy in the normal way".

The President and other "stability-oriented people" in China's ruling Communist Party, however, want to keep the rate stable because "if it's not stable, then people will think that China isn't stable and that will be bad".

Kroeber added that, under Xi, "the desire to control things has won out over the desire to reform and liberalise".