China's Crushing the Art of Buying the Dip

A Chinese fund is making good money from its stock purchases. It's also creating confusing market narratives.

- Shuli Ren

The stock market is not the economy. In 2025, other factors, such as retail participation in the US and corporate governance reform in South Korea, are pushing markets to tease record highs despite a weak economic reality.

In China, a key catalyst is the involvement of the so-called "national team," a group of institutional investors that buys index funds to stem market routs. The main players include Central Huijin Investment, a domestic unit of the sovereign fund China Investment Corporation (CIC); China Securities Finance Corporation; and the Social Security Fund.

While this intervention has been around for at least a decade, these state-owned funds came out of the shadow in 2025. In early April, when US President Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs led to global sell-offs, Huijin, the biggest by far, openly pledged to support markets. For the first time, it declared itself a member of the national team.

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