China’s main state broadcaster yesterday paraded a financial journalist “confessing” to causing the stock market “great losses,” as authorities seek to rein in a rout on the exchanges.
Wang Xiaolu (王曉璐), a journalist for business magazine Caijing, was held after writing a story in July saying the securities regulator was studying plans for government funds to exit the market.
Beijing has launched interventions on a grand scale to try — with little success — to shore up plunging share prices after a debt-fueled bubble burst in June.
Britain’s Financial Times last weekend reported that China had decided to stop buying shares in favor of intensifying a crackdown on those “destabilizing” the market, although there was speculation as recently as Thursday last week that government funds were acquiring stock.
China has unleashed an unprecedented package of support measures, including using state-backed entities to buy stocks and cracking down on “malicious” short-selling — when investors sell shares they do not own in anticipation of a fall in their price.
However, the moves have done little to calm investors and concerns about the health of China’s economy and its ability to manage its finances has infected world markets, sparking one of the worst global sell-offs, on Aug. 24, since the financial crisis.
Chinese shares yesterday continued their slide, with Shanghai down by as much as 1.45 percent in the afternoon, hurt by profit-taking after two sessions of sharp gains and by economic worries before the release of manufacturing data.
Chinese state broadcaster CCTV showed Wang saying that he had sought to create a stir and catch the eyes of readers with his articles.
“I should not have published a report that heavily and negatively affected the market at such a sensitive time... [I] caused such great losses to the country and to stock investors. I am deeply sorry,” he said.
Xinhua news agency said Wang was held for fabricating and spreading fake information, which had “caused panic and disorder on [the] stock market, seriously undermined market confidence and inflicted huge losses on the country and investors.”
In China, high-profile criminal suspects are regularly paraded on television apparently confessing to their actions, in what rights lawyers say is a violation of criminal procedure.
Once prosecutors post charges, conviction is all but guaranteed in courts, which are tightly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
Journalists’ rights group Reporters Without Borders last week said it was “absurd” to blame China’s stock market crash on a reporter and called for Wang’s immediate release.
“Suggesting that a business journalist was responsible for the spectacular fall in share prices is a denial of reality. Blaming the stock market crisis on a lone reporter is beyond absurd,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said in a statement.
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