As China’s stockmarket corrects, regulators try doing less

THE JOB of China’s top securities cop is a precarious one. Its fortunes are closely linked with the vagaries of the country’s stockmarket. A crash can mean the sack or worse for the man in charge. Xiao Gang, who headed the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) during the spectacular boom and bust of 2015, was fired and has become an object of scorn among investors. Liu Shiyu, who took over from Mr Xiao and saw China rank among the world’s worst-performing markets in 2018, later faced corruption charges (which might have been overlooked had the market done better). As China’s CSI 300 index of blue-chip stocks tumbled by 14% in late February and early March this year, attention turned to their successor, Yi Huiman.