Is China investable again?

WITH Chinese stocks rallying hard this year, global investors are asking: is the country investable after all?

The answer is yes, and it always was. The broad Chinese market had fallen sharply this decade for a variety of reasons, but it was wrong for investors to dismiss the world’s second-largest market as uninvestable. Even now nothing fundamental has changed. No great economic revival is under way. The economy is still burdened by an ageing workforce and crippling debt, which are likely to slow the trend growth to under 3 per cent, well below Beijing’s target.

The big shift is in sentiment, accelerated by the recent news that DeepSeek offers a cost-effective Chinese alternative to US artificial intelligence (AI). Investors – foreigners in particular – are now rediscovering China for what it has been all along: a difficult market but too vast to be ignored, and capable of generating great innovation and opportunity in select pockets.