From mid-2014 until early June, ChiNext, a market for start-ups, more than tripled. China’s mania derived partly from the way the market functioned. Regulators act as gatekeepers over initial public offerings, in effect deciding which firms list, when and at what price. Because the government was initially slow to approve new IPOs, those firms already lucky enough to have ChiNext listings became financing vehicles. Investors pumped their shares higher, knowing that the capital could buy firms waiting in the long queue to list. Hence the wooden-flooring company that remade itself as an online-gaming developer and the fireworks-maker that became a peer-to-peer lender, among dozens of similar mutations. Before long, the ChiNext price-to-earnings ratio had reached 147, putting it in the same league as NASDAQ during the dotcom era.