People who go long China's economic growth by buying their equity index will miss out on a lot China's growth. Via the Economist I came by this interesting fact:
"Qiao Liu and Alan Siu of the University of Hong Kong calculate that the average return on equity of unlisted private firms is fully ten percentage points higher than the modest 4% achieved by wholly or partly state-owned enterprises."
While looking at this, it is important to note that this is just state owned firms and not firms with ownership by government officials. But the outperformance of unlisted firms does suggest that the average investor looking to go long China's listed equities are not participating in a large portion of China's economic growth. Marc Faber anticipated this as far back as 2002 when he wrote Tomorrow's Gold and made the analogy between China today and the United States in the 1800's. The 19th century United States economy grew a lot, but the opportunities available to foreign investors, mostly railroad stocks, didn't give foreign investors corresponding returns.