Laugh. Because it’s funny.

When Chinese stocks get cookin,’ they tend to rally on a 90-degree angle. When you see it on a chart, it’s hard not to tee-hee.

On Friday, the Hang Seng Tech gauge — basically a who’s who of China’s homegrown tech heavyweights — capped a six-week surge with a near 7% single-session fireworks show.

As the figure shows, the index is up a ridiculous 39% since mid-January.

I’ve been doing this (and as ever, I’ll readily concede that when pressed, I can’t nail down exactly what “this” is) for a very long time, and as such, I’m confident in the assertion that it’s virtually impossible to justify a 40% rally in a benchmark equity index over that compressed a time frame.

I’m not suggesting Chinese shares (and particularly big Chinese tech, which is still trading more than 45% below record highs hit four years ago this month), aren’t a “bargain.” And at least for the purposes of this brief update, I’m not cautioning on the vagaries of CCP policymaking, which can be cruelly capricious. All I’m saying is that at the index level, a 40% rally in six weeks is an enormous move, and Hong Kong-listed shares have staged two such rallies in the space of just five months.

If you measure from the September nadir, H-shares (so, the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index) are up 73%, which is either a reflection of just how “successful” Xi was at creating abject despondency or else a testament to the wild-eyed nature of what, at times, still behaves like a frontier market despite being comprised of some very large companies. (Both. It’s a reflection of both. If you want to explain the exaggerated swings, you can point to the notoriously emotional Chinese retail set, but if we’re honest, a lot of it’s hot money chasing in and out of whatever the regional trade du jour happens to be. For a while it was India, then it was Japan and now it’s China again.)

This week, the rally was aided and abetted by Alibaba. Regular readers know the story. Jack Ma, back from the dead, is kinda/sorta in Xi’s good graces again, so much so that he even got to shake the emperor’s hand earlier this week while attending a shakedown masquerading as a “symposium.”

On Friday, Alibaba rose nearly 15%. As the figure shows, that was the best session in almost three years.

The catalyst for Friday’s surge was earnings, and specifically Alibaba’s top-line readout, which beat estimates on the swiftest growth for cloud services since 2022.

If you’re curious, Ma’s worth $41 billion now, up $6 billion over the course of the six-week Chinese tech rally illustrated above. That makes him… well, still “poor” compared to demigods like Elon Musk and that silly nerd Mark Zuckerberg who dresses like a rapper now, and seems to fancy himself a regular Conor McGregor on the badass scale where 10 is Conor McGregor and 1 is… well, Mark Zuckerberg.

As for whether it’s too late to jump aboard the China tech train, the honest answer (my honest answer, anyway) is that I have no idea. What I can say, though, is that we’ve seen this movie more times than Christmas-loving Americans have seen Elf.

It’s not so much that it ends poorly as it is that post-2021, these fleeting bouts of euphoria invariably fizzle out when it dawns on everyone that at the end of the day (see what I did there?), everything hinges on Xi Jinping, which is to say on the only man alive who still believes wholeheartedly in uncompromising, mid-90s-style communism.