"You can move in and out of an ETF as you want if you want to overweight China," without redemption fees, said Brad Durham, managing director of Emerging Portfolio Fund Research.
"If, oh my God, the Chinese government is rattling their sabers over invading Taiwan, let's get out," he said.
Exchange-traded funds, which track indexes, also have lower expenses than China-centered mutual funds run by active managers. Barclays says its fund will have an expense ratio of 0.74 percent; Culloton noted that expenses averaged 2.2 percent for actively managed funds focusing on Asia, excluding Japan.
As a result, Fuhr said, an ETF may prove valuable to some investors.
"It's for investors more likely to want to make decisions themselves," she said.
Jim Pacetti, head of ETF International, a consulting firm, added that previous exchange-traded funds focused on Taiwanese and Indian indexes have sold well with individual investors. Lee Kranefuss, chief executive of iShares, the part of Barclays Global responsible for ETFs, said he expected demand for the Barclays offering to be split roughly equally among retail and institutional investors.
"When you look at the longer-term future, the growth rates, China is a good broad play," Durham said. "You can get a lot of short-term factors dead wrong and if you're in the China market for a long time, you'll do well."
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