Rear Window | Coping with the facts

Severo Portela

China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen bourses were hardly hit by capitalism’s core nemesis: the stock market crash! Although, more than a few liberal onlookers see the seismological activity as a normal situation, neither friend nor foe, and a few more put it simply as a moment of purification, ditto system adjustment, we cannot ignore the importance of such an event; first of all to China, but more than that, to every country big or small. Credit Napoleon’s premonition: China is today the second/first global economy and what happens in Beijing will reverberate to all corners of the world.
So… we care to bring to this column some points we consider worth mentioning among the tomes of good information and analysis available to the public eye, almost everywhere, indeed. And the first one is precisely the unavailability of comprehensive news…in China.
It is not a hidden truth that the criteria the Chinese government imposes upon all media (state-controlled or else)…is very restrictive. We just have to recall the blackout surrounding the Tianjin disaster, a few days before Black Monday, to recognize the similarity in the way relevant information is disclosed.
Amidst the seething waves of protests in the northeastern city, authorities revealed that there were some hints pointing to criminal hands behind the industrial catastrophe.
Curiously, after Government intervention in the stock market “to end a USD 5 trillion rout” (quoting Bloomberg News that quotes sources described as “people familiar with the matter”), and a trust-building statement by Premier Li Keqiang, there came the news of a serious inquiry about the possibility of some financial players, including the biggest of them all, the SOE Huaitai, being liable for malpractice or irregularities during the turbulence in the Chinese stock markets. It seems an argument of last resort to avoid dealing with the facts by criminalizing them…in a casus obliqui. However, this situation is rather different. If we can picture a case contained in the Tianjin brief, we cannot but picture new cases arising from the doctoring of information related to financial matters. Sooner rather than later the markets, an abstract entity, will read official Chinese rates as fiction.
The political timing of the Black Monday crash and its ripples occurred at a very inconvenient moment, to say the least of such a viciously premature coincidence. President Xi Jinping is counting down his political agenda to the September 3rd military parade to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the victory over Japan in the Pacific War. China observers consider the parade to be the first opportunity Xi has to stand before the world as China´s commander-in-chief.
Allegedly, Chinese authorities had already spent 500 billion among other rescue measures to stabilize the stock markets. Shanghai and Shenzhen will shut down during the national holy-days of 3rd and 4th September. Later, President Xi will visit the US of A.
Final note: The Hong Kong Police took almost one year after Occupy Central and the Umbrella Movement to charge Scholarim’s reluctant hero. Joshua Wong was charged with inciting and participating in illegal assembly. Rule as law or creative paranoia?