The more things change...The Standard reports the IPO of China's Bank of Communications is likely to be the sixth most popular IPO ever in Hong Kong. Retail orders were HK$110 billion, making the issue 150 times over subscribed. Clearly retail investors aren't worried by bad loans, a murky regulatory environment, credit and risk controls and all those other pesky things.

Now read the following passage from the excellent Mr. China by Tim Clissold, talking about the previous China bubble:

But the excitement in the domestic economy was nothing in comparison to the delirium sparked off outside China. Chief executives from all over the world stampeded into China in a cavalry charge waving checkbooks under the noses of their smiling but slightly bemused hosts. For a time, it looked as though many of them had abandoned conventional business logic in the search for the mythical "billion-plus market" while money poured into the country. The investment frenzy soon gained a self-sustaining momentum that probaby even surprised [paramount leader] Deng, its hoary old instigator.

The real detonation, however, occured in the financial markets. with the China investment frenzy at its height, in early 1993 an obscure Hong Kong registered car company with assets on the mainland applied to list on the stock exchange. It wanted to raise about eight million dollars, but it received application monies for just under four billion! Encouraged by these wild successes, the Chinese government authorised nine domestic companies to list in Hong Kong....

At the end of the previous year [i.e. late 1992], a small bus company called Jinbei had gone public in New York and raised millions of dollars; it was the first listing of a Chinese company on the NYSE, but now investors wanted more.

These are interesting times.