Stocks; Xi-Putin chat; VCs in the PRC; Messi; 龙年快乐！
Schedule update: Unless there is something really interesting next week during the Spring Festival Holiday there will not be a daily newsletter. The whole country will be off for the week and there should not be much going on. We did record a Sharp China podcast today that will be in your inboxes Friday, and we are planning to record one next week as well. The Sinocism Chat will be open over the holiday.
Happy Year of the Dragon!
Summary of today’s top items:
Stock markets saved for the holiday - Key indexes were all up over 1% on the final day of trading of the Year of the Rabbit. The Shanghai Composite closed at 2865.9. Policymakers’ frenzied efforts over the last couple of weeks to stabilize the markets before the Spring Festival worked. Skepticism is warranted that nothing they have done so far addresses the underlying economic and political reasons for the sharp declines, but policymakers are signaling quite forcefully that they do not want the markets to keep going down, and they…