China Daily Briefing

Xi Jinping's White House meeting with Trump is the geopolitical catalyst reshaping China equity positioning in real time — trade, artificial intelligence, and critical mineral supply chains are the three verticals explicitly named in summit communications. SCMP noted that China's trade surplus swelled to record levels last month with exports +25% annualised, giving Beijing negotiating leverage. The market read is granular: tech hardware and critical-mineral names are pricing in potential tariff relief, while consumer internet (Tencent, TCOM) — which has less to gain from trade terms — is selling off on unrelated regulatory and rate-driven flows.

DBS Bank Hong Kong told clients Thursday that the era of treating China as a single macro bet is giving way to individual-name selection, with technology displacing property as the primary growth engine. The bank highlighted EV names (LI +1.97% today confirming the thesis) and AI-infrastructure plays as the preferred loci. The property/real estate sector's +0.84% session confirms the asset class is bottoming rather than recovering — stabilisation, not re-acceleration. For PBOC watchers: a property floor without a property rally gives Beijing room to hold rates without triggering stimulus, which is structurally constructive for the RMB.

A Chinese SOE industrial compressor maker surged 1,700% on debut at the Shanghai Stock Exchange before regulators intervened to curb speculative trading — the kind of new-listing speculative froth that typically appears at late-cycle risk-on moments. Simultaneously, Deloitte China told SCMP that Beijing's tightening of humanoid robot IPO approvals poses no threat to companies with genuine commercialisation strategies — funding channels remain open for qualified players. The combined signal: the STAR Market and A-share IPO environment is bifurcating between speculative SOE-listing pops and substantive deeptech IPOs, with regulators actively suppressing the former.