Financiers’ pronouncements on China do not match their actions

brands itself “Asia’s world city”, a label that has been mostly deployed in mockery over the past three years of political suppression and pandemic-induced isolation. Yet the city’s government would like to make the slogan true once again. It had hoped the Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit, which welcomed financial bigwigs on November 2nd, would advertise the once semi-autonomous city’s return to the world. Instead, the event turned into another symbol of the headaches facing Western investors in China. Mainland bankers, with whom chief executives would have hobnobbed, could not attend without ten days of quarantine on their return home. American lawmakers urged executives not to go, citing China’s human-rights record. China’s stockmarket offers another illustration of the forces battering once-optimistic investors. Although it inched up slightly in recent days, on unfounded rumours that China’s “zero covid” policy may soon come to an end, the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index, a basket of Hong Kong-listed Chinese stocks, is down by almost 40% this year. The lack of any change of tone at the Communist Party Congress in mid-October led to the most recent lurch. Warning lights elsewhere are also flashing red. A deteriorating property market threatens to upend China’s economic-growth model. Souring relations with America have led to new trade restrictions, most recently on advanced chips.