Chinese tech stocks jumped despite Washington’s threat to ban apps including TikTok, as traders instead focused on buying up names that could benefit from a decoupling of the world’s two biggest economies.
Shenzhen’s tech-focused ChiNext index rose 2.6 per cent on Monday while the Star 50 index of start-ups listed on Shanghai’s Star board soared 7.3 per cent. Those indices’ gains were well above the 1.6 per cent rise for the broader CSI 300 of large-cap stocks listed in both cities.
The bullish hue in China’s markets came even as Mike Pompeo, US secretary of state, warned on Sunday that President Donald Trump would take action in the coming days against Chinese apps. Those include ByteDance’s TikTok and Tencent’s WeChat, which the US claims are “feeding data directly to the Chinese Communist party, their national security apparatus”.