SHANGHAI: China’s latest effort to steady its sliding stock market struggled for traction on Tuesday, with shares pinned near one-year lows and investors saying a familiar playbook of encouraging money into the market was falling short this time.
China has the weakest-performing major stock market globally this year, with the blue-chip CSI300 down 13 percent since January. The index notched its largest monthly fall for a decade in October, led by a slump in AI stocks, and closed 0.2 percent lower on Tuesday.
The performance is a setback for efforts to turn Chinese stocks into a reliable investment and funding source for the AI boom. On Monday regulators responded with measures aimed at funding stock purchases by brokers, funds and companies.
Authorities have also instructed banks to hold off on new listings or large share sales in order to support the market, the Financial Times newspaper reported on Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.
The market regulator, the China Securities Regulatory Commission, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the report.
Fund manager Chen Jiande said steps — including central bank swap operations to fund stock purchases and encouraging buybacks — repeated efforts in 2024 and offered a chance to sell, rather than buy.
The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index dropped 0.8 percent on Tuesday and sits, like the blue-chip index, near its lowest level in a year. The tech-focused STAR Chip Index tumbled as much as 7 percent to its lowest since December 2025, while the AI index dropped more than 4 percent.
Wang Yapei, fund manager at Zijie Private Fund, said one issue is that the government is prodding market participants to shell out the money, rather than providing the funding.
Under the announced schemes, market participants obtain liquidity from the central bank via swaps or re-lending to buy shares.
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