What is the IPO lottery (打新)?

Mainland IPOs allocate shares to retail subscribers by lot before listing, not by price. On the STAR Market one lot is 500 shares. Unitree's online lot rate was 0.0181% — 1/0.000181 = one lot per roughly 5,525 applications — with oversubscription tallied at 5,500x to 8,000x depending on the count. At the ¥150.80 issue price, one lot cost ¥75,400 to subscribe. Winning the lottery and profiting from it are two different events: the winner still chooses when to sell into the first day's tape.

What are limit-up and limit-down boards, and what is the 龙虎榜?

A-shares trade inside daily price bands — roughly ±10% on the main boards and ±20% on the STAR Market and ChiNext. When a stock hits the band it can trade no further in that direction that day, which converts price into a queue: at limit-down, sellers wait for buyers; at limit-up, buyers wait for shares. The 龙虎榜 (dragon-tiger list) is the public daily ledger in which exchanges disclose the top brokerage seats and order sizes in unusually active names — on July 20, 2026 it showed single buying orders above ¥1 billion while the same session ran 200+ limit-downs.

What is an outright reverse repo, and what does equal-amount rollover mean?

An outright reverse repo (买断式逆回购) is a People's Bank of China operation that lends liquidity to banks against bonds, here for a fixed tenor — the August 14, 2026 operation was ¥1 trillion for six months (185 days), maturing February 15, 2027. An equal-amount rollover means a same-sized operation matured the same day, so the net liquidity change was zero. The month's genuine net addition came earlier: on August 4-5 a ¥500-billion three-month operation against ¥300 billion maturing — a net add of ¥200 billion.

Who is the 'national team' that appeared on July 20?

Shorthand for state investment funds — chiefly Central Huijin and affiliated vehicles — that buy index shares and ETFs to steady the market. On July 20, 2026, the same morning CSRC chairman Wu Qing held a symposium with eight investors at a Beijing brokerage branch, Chinese financial media reported these funds intensifying purchases; the CSRC published its statement pledging to 'spare no effort to maintain stable market operation' two minutes after the close.

The Second Price: The Retail Investor's China

Five numbers ran through Chinese feeds between mid-July and early September 2026. ¥475,000 — the paper gain on one subscription lot of robot-maker Unitree’s STAR Market debut, screenshotted and circulated on listing morning. ¥1 trillion — “the central bank is releasing water,” the headline that a hot-search page showed to 9.14 million viewers on August 14. 237 — the limit-down count our column tallied on the Monday after the worst week, in a session where more than 3,700 stocks fell and the power sector ran a limit-up wave of its own. Two times — how much harder the same chip sector fell in Shenzhen than in New York during the week of July 13–17. ¥10 — a seat on an electric two-wheeler carrying four people up the mountain road toward Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing, where the official shuttle also costs ¥10.

Our Chinese-language column ran these as five dispatches. Read together they are not five stories but one machine. Every number above was true, posted and publicly available at the moment it mattered — in the offering announcements, on the central bank’s own notice, on every trading terminal, in the fare itself. Each also carried a second price, a cost the posted number did not announce, paid by whoever stood at a particular end of the structure behind it: the open-day chaser rather than the lottery winner, the concentrated fund holder rather than the dividend anchor, the headline reader rather than the plumbing reader, the fourth passenger on the bike. This piece — the eighth in the China Decoder series — takes the machine apart, gear by gear and instance by instance.

The gears

Three gears run through all five dispatches.

The posted number is real. The subscription rate was in the offering documents; the 85.28% first-day turnover stood on the K-line by the closing bell; the central bank’s August 14 notice stated the tenor, the operation size and — one line down — the maturing operation it was rolling over; the limit-down count updated live on every terminal; the penalty schedule for unlicensed passenger transport is published. None of these machines ran on concealed information. They ran on which line of the notice got read, and by whom.

The structure decides who pays. One stock, one listing day, three destinies: pre-IPO cost, locked strategic placement, public lottery. One global selloff, roughly twice the drawdown in the market where holdings sat concentrated in trend-riding funds. One Monday, one door rationed shut from the inside (limit-down) and another rationed shut from the outside (limit-up). One fare, two seats — one with an operator’s license and insurance, one without.

The handoff. An 85% first-day turnover is not a statistic; it is a relay — lottery winners passing shares to open-day buyers at seven times the issue price. A limit board is a queue. A shuttle line is a queue. In each case the second price is what the last party in the relay pays, and the relay is visible in public data to anyone who looks at the right line.

Instance one: the lottery and the handoff

Unitree (宇树科技, STAR Market code 688836) listed on August 19, 2026 at an issue price of ¥150.80, raising ¥6.1 billion. The open printed near ¥1,100 — +629.4% — putting one 500-share lot roughly ¥475,000 above cost at the first trade; the screenshots said ¥474,600, which is the same arithmetic (500 × (1,100 − 150.80) ≈ 475,000). The close came at ¥845, +460.34%, a market value of ¥341.8 billion; the intraday peak market value touched ¥444.9 billion. First-day turnover ran at 85.28% of the tradable float [unverified — turnover as relayed by Chinese financial media]. The next morning the stock fell more than 17% intraday and the market value dropped below ¥300 billion — (4,449 − 3,000) / 4,449 = 32.6% off the open within a day; Reuters tallied more than ¥170 billion of market value lost across three sessions and ran the story under bubble fears.

The structure beneath the tape had three tiers. Before the public ever saw a quote, the strategic placement — 8,089,286 shares, about 20% of the offering — had gone at issue price to a roster the financial press itemized: the National Social Security Fund through several portfolios, Tencent, China Telecom, China National Petroleum’s capital arm, China Southern Power Grid, and DeepSeek, whose 933,400 shares carry a 36-month lock-up. JW View put the placement’s paper gain at ¥7.68 billion on debut — recomputed, that is ¥7.68bn / 8,089,286 ≈ ¥949 a share, which is the peak price minus the issue price (1,100 − 150.80 = 949), i.e. a peak-basis figure; at the ¥845 close the same shares were ≈ ¥5.6 billion over water. Further down the cap table, pre-IPO holders sat at cost bases the column relayed from Phoenix and Sina finance reports: Meituan and Sequoia positions above ¥20 billion, founder Wang Xingxing’s stake past ¥100 billion [unverified — pre-IPO positions as relayed]. Then the public: an online lot rate of 0.0181%, which is 1/0.000181 — one lot per roughly 5,525 applications, with oversubscription tallied at 5,500× to 8,000× depending on the count.

Both sides of this instance need reporting. The working side: the allocation machine did exactly what it advertises. The lottery executed, the pension fund’s placement gained billions for future payouts, long-horizon capital locked itself for years at issue price, and a real company got funded — Unitree is not vaporware: its quadruped robots hold a first-tier global share, its prospectus gross margin runs near 60% [unverified — margin as relayed], and its machines performed at the last Spring Festival gala. The failing side: the 85.28% turnover is the relay made visible — most of the float that won the lottery sold into day one, and the posted number that circulated on listing morning (¥475,000 a lot) was collected largely at the expense of whoever bought the open. A day-one buyer at ¥1,101 held roughly −36% by the next morning’s low (1,101 → ≈701 intraday). The column’s one-line tally of the machine: same stock, same day, three destinies — and the destiny was set by which tier of the structure you were standing in before the open printed.

Instance two: the same storm, twice the amplitude

The week of July 13–17, 2026 took the global AI supply chain down together. In New York the PHLX Semiconductor Index fell more than 9% on the week, its worst since April 2025, and on Friday the 17th sank as much as 5.7% into technical bear-market territory — Bloomberg’s headline attributed the break to a fizzling 105% AI rally. The repricing was valuation-graded: ARM, at a 310× price-earnings multiple, fell 17.38% on the week; Nvidia, at roughly 31×, fell 3.86%.

In Shenzhen the same storm landed at roughly twice the amplitude. The ChiNext index lost 10.78% on the week [unverified — weekly index figures as relayed by our column], the Shenzhen Component 8.90%, the Shanghai Composite 5.81%; on Friday alone ChiNext fell 7.15% and the Shanghai Composite 3.05% to 3,764.15. Across the chain as our column tabulated it: A-share computing-chip names averaged −17.51% against −9.14% for their US counterparts — 17.51/9.14 = 1.92× — and data-center and cloud names averaged −19.04% against −7.97%, 19.04/7.97 = 2.39× [unverified — sector averages from the column’s own data pull]. Storage-chip leader Demingli went from ¥980 to ¥482 in under a month, (980 − 482)/980 = 50.8% [unverified — relayed]. One corner of the market barely moved: the power names, where China General Nuclear rose 2.07% and Yangtze Power was near flat, matching the US pattern — NextEra up 0.95% — as money sat in dividend-paying electricity on both sides of the Pacific.

Both sides again. The working side: the week was a synchronized global repricing, not a China event — the same chain fell from Amsterdam to Tokyo, the shelter worked on both exchanges, and valuation discipline (the 310× multiple fell hardest, the 31× multiple least) is price discovery doing its job. The failing side: synchronization does not explain amplitude. The same sector falling 1.9 to 2.4 times harder in one market than another is a property of the market, and our column’s attribution — public funds piled into the same crowded names (the “bundling” our column calls 抱团), thinner liquidity to absorb an exit — is an explanation offered by the column, flagged here as such, not a settled measurement. What the same column flagged next was mechanical and checkable: with US markets falling again on Friday after China’s close, Monday’s open in Shanghai would be pricing information it had not yet traded.

Instance three: the Monday after — queues in both directions

Monday, July 20 priced the backlog. More than 3,700 stocks fell; Eastmoney’s recap counted over 200 limit-downs, our column’s tally 237, concentrated in the technology chain — electronic chemicals and components around −10%; Hefei Urban Construction logged a fifth consecutive limit-down. And in the same session: a limit-up wave through power and coal — Huayin Power and Leshan Power at two consecutive boards, Dayou Energy at three in five sessions, Lu’an, Huaibei Mining, Yankuang and Zhengzhou Coal at the band — sector indexes of +7.14% for oil-and-gas extraction, +5.30% for coal, +4.80% for power. Turnover across both exchanges ran ¥2.7 trillion, up ¥47.2 billion on the session [unverified — turnover as relayed]. The Shanghai Composite, down early, closed +0.85% at 3,796.28 after a late-session rebound; Shenzhen closed −0.71%.

The public ledger showed the other side of the panic. The dragon-tiger list for the day disclosed single buying orders of ¥1.33 billion in Dongshan Precision, ¥1.1 billion in Andon Health, ¥870 million in Shanghai Electric Power’s printed-circuit peer WUS Printed Circuit, and ¥358 million of net institutional buying in Accelink [unverified — ledger figures as relayed by our column] — buying assigned to specific names while the aggregate tape showed 200+ doors shut at limit-down. The catalysts the recaps itemized for the power bid were concrete: June raw-coal output posting its biggest drop in a decade, the NDRC’s new medium- and long-term energy supply contracts, the State Grid’s third 2026 ultra-high-voltage equipment tender (per a CITIC Securities note our column cited), summer peak demand, and the rotation itself out of crowded tech into low-multiple, high-dividend names. The same morning, CSRC chairman Wu Qing visited a Beijing brokerage branch and held a symposium with eight investors — large, mid-sized, small and retail — with the regulator’s statement, published two minutes after the close, pledging to “spare no effort to maintain stable market operation”; Chinese financial media reported state funds intensifying purchases in parallel.

Both sides. The working side: the session re-routed ¥2.7 trillion of trading in a single day; the shelter (power, coal) admitted money at posted prices; the disclosure machine ran same-day — anyone could read the billion-yuan buys on the public ledger by evening, and the regulator’s retail-facing channel (a symposium, a statement) ran the same day as the tape. The failing side: a limit-down is a rationed exit — at 200+ doors, sellers queued with no trades — and a limit-up board is a rationed entry into the shelter; the second price of that Monday was paid in queue position. The column’s summary line of the session was arithmetic, not sentiment: the market did not lack money; it lacked direction.

Instance four: the trillion that wasn’t

On August 14, 2026 the PBOC announced a ¥1-trillion six-month outright reverse repo operation — 185 days, maturing February 15, 2027 — and the number went straight to the hot-search page, where the column relayed 9.14 million views [unverified — view count as relayed]. The comment section split into two camps with opposite convictions: one read a trillion of new money debasing deposits, the other read a stimulus about to launch stocks. Both priced a net injection. The notice itself, and the State Council Information Office’s English release of it, carried the second price one line down: ¥1 trillion of six-month operations matured in August. New operation in, maturing operation out — 1T − 1T = 0 net. The household-mortgage analogy the column used is exact: refinancing a ¥1-million loan with another ¥1-million loan leaves the wallet unchanged.

The operation sat in a plumbing context the notice also documented. August was the peak month for local-government and special-bond issuance — bond sales draining cash from the banking system — with about ¥1.9 trillion of MLF and outright repos maturing across the month [unverified — maturity total as relayed]; the July Politburo meeting had set the second half’s fiscal pace [unverified — policy framing as relayed]. The month’s genuine addition came early and smaller: on August 4–5 a ¥500-billion three-month operation against ¥300 billion maturing — a net add of ¥200 billion, the second consecutive month of expansion. The choice on the 14th to roll exactly rather than expand was, per the column’s relay, conditioned on money-market rates already sitting below the policy rate — cash ample enough that adding more would overshoot. The timing carried its own signal: the announcement landed the same day as an afternoon equity wobble, and Securities Times relayed the operation reading as “well above broker expectations” [unverified — characterization as relayed].

Both sides. The working side: the plumbing did its job — liquidity held flat through the year’s heaviest bond-issuance month, the calibration is visible across the calendar (expand in early August when needed, roll exactly mid-month when not), and every number involved was published at the time. The failing side: the second price of the posted number was paid by whoever traded the headline — both the dilution camp and the launch camp were positioned against a net injection that did not exist, while the actual net event of the month (+¥200 billion, early August) circulated without a hot-search page.

Instance five: the ten-yuan seat

The fifth posted number sits outside the market, at the same price point as its official alternative. At the collection points around the Zhongshan scenic area in Nanjing — Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum’s hill — riders on electric two-wheelers offer the run up the mountain road at ¥10 a head, a discount for three traveling together, “a few minutes and you’re there,” as the Yangtze Evening News reporter was pitched in the paper’s September 4 undercover visit. The official shuttle also charges ¥10 a person. The fare is identical; what the rider sells is the wait — no line, direct routing — and on the day the reporter counted four passengers to a bike, mostly without helmets, up a road of gradients, blind bends and oncoming traffic. The second price is posted nowhere: no operating license, no insurance, and a penalty ceiling the responding departments put at roughly ¥20 for the illegal-carriage violation — against ¥40 of revenue on a full run (10 × 4).

The pattern the paper documented is a schedule, not an incident. Nanjing traffic police ran checks on scenic-area e-bike carriage in 2023, when rides ran ¥10–20; visitors complained through 2025 about passenger e-bikes inside the core scenic zone; the September 2026 undercover found the same fares after the area had installed checkpoints and physical barriers — which the riders route around on what the report calls wild paths. Each campaign compressed the trade; each time demand re-grew it. The demand side is legible: the distances between the metro, the gate and the sights are long, summer heat is a factor, elderly and children walk slowly, and the official capacity covers the points it covers. The supply side is equally legible: the riders are nearby residents riding their own vehicles on their own time, and the trade is — the column’s relay — tens of runs a day of real income.

Both sides. The working side: the market matched a real, metered demand at a posted price identical to the official one, and the enforcement record shows the violation is neither ignored nor hidden — it has been checked, fined, barriered and reported on a three-year schedule. The failing side: the identical fare conceals a different contract — one seat buys a licensed operator with insurance behind it, the other buys speed with the risk carried by all four aboard, and the ¥20 ceiling does not move that arithmetic (40 > 20 by 2×). The column’s closing construction: the unlicensed ride is a shadow grown out of demand; sweep the shadow without catching the demand, and the shadow grows back by the next holiday.

The ladder underneath

The five dispatches sit on one ladder, and the rungs are worth naming. At the top rung the state’s own balance sheet appears inside each machine: the social-security fund inside the IPO gain, the insurance and pension money anchored in the dividend names that held through the crash week, the state funds buying on July 20, the PBOC plumbing under the August bond peak. The middle rung is the channel itself — the lottery, the price band, the public ledger, the operation notice — each machine open to anyone with an account and a terminal. The bottom rung is household income and the informal margin around it, where a resident with a two-wheeler prices the official fare exactly and sells the queue instead. The posted numbers travel fastest at the middle rung — ¥475,000, ¥1 trillion, 237 — because they are the simplest objects to circulate; the second prices are set at the rungs above and below, by lock-up schedules and fine schedules, which change far more slowly than any feed.

Two calendars frame what is scheduled next, as distinct from what was interpreted. The repo calendar: the ¥1-trillion rollover matures February 15, 2027, and the monthly operations between now and then are announced on the PBOC’s own page. The lock-up calendar: the strategic shares — including the 36-month DeepSeek tranche — begin unlocking from 2029. Between those dates, the next STAR “first stock” and the next holiday crowd at the scenic gates will each post their own numbers.

What outsiders usually get wrong

Four corrections, all load-bearing and all checkable against the posted record. First: “Beijing injected ¥1 trillion of stimulus on August 14” — the notice itself documents an equal-amount rollover, net zero on the day; the month’s net addition was ¥200 billion, delivered in the smaller August 4–5 operation. The number was real; “stimulus” was the wrong noun. Second: “the July break was a China AI problem” — the selloff was synchronized from Philadelphia (SOX into a bear market, worst week since April 2025) through Shanghai; what was specifically Chinese was the amplitude, roughly 1.9–2.4× the US sector declines, and the explanation for that amplitude (fund concentration, liquidity) is our column’s attribution, not a settled finding. Third: “200+ limit-downs means a market with no buyers” — the same session traded ¥2.7 trillion, disclosed billion-yuan single buys on the public ledger, and closed the Shanghai Composite up 0.85% after a late rebound; what was rationed was access, not money. Fourth: “unlicensed scenic-area rides undercut the official fare” — both cost ¥10; the underground operator matches the posted price and sells immediacy, with the discount taken in the unposted part of the contract.

Sources

Provenance & disclosure. This piece synthesizes five Chinese-language originals from our WeChat channel — “中一签赚47万，只爽了一天：宇树今天跌破3000亿” (2026-08-20), “AI芯片一周蒸发万亿：中国产业链为何跌得比美国更狠？” (2026-07-20), “200只跌停的日子里，谁在偷偷捡筹码” (2026-07-20), “央行放水1万亿刷屏，但真相和你想的不一样” (2026-08-14) and “10元一位挤4人，中山陵黑车为啥治不完？” (2026-09-06) — drafted with AI assistance under human editorial direction and adapted to English 2026-09-06. Verification: the Unitree listing (issue price, +460.34% close at ¥845, ¥444.9bn peak and ¥341.8bn close market value, three-day ¥170bn+ drawdown) against Reuters, Yahoo Finance and JW View, including the strategic-placement roster; the July 13–17 week against Bloomberg (SOX bear market, worst week since April 2025), Yahoo Finance and StratNews Global; July 20 against the CSRC’s own announcement and Eastmoney’s session recap; the August 14 operation against the State Council Information Office’s English release and Xinhua on the August 4–5 operation; the Zhongshan rides against the Yangtze Evening News original and the department responses relayed by Sina. Figures relayed only through our column — the 85.28% turnover, 0.0181% lot rate, pre-IPO position sizes, weekly and sector index averages, dragon-tiger order sizes, session turnover, the 9.14-million view count, the ~¥1.9-trillion August maturities, and prospectus margins — are marked [unverified] above. Ratios and bases recomputed: 1/0.000181 = 5,525; 500 × (1,100 − 150.80) ≈ ¥475,000; 500 × (845 − 150.80) = ¥347,100; ¥7.68bn / 8,089,286 ≈ ¥949 = 1,100 − 150.80 (peak basis); 17.51/9.14 = 1.92×; 19.04/7.97 = 2.39×; (980 − 482)/980 = 50.8%; (4,449 − 3,000)/4,449 = 32.6%; 1T − 1T = 0; 500bn − 300bn = +200bn; 10 × 4 = 40 vs a ¥20 fine. This is reported synthesis — not a SigPulse measurement, not investment advice. Our first-party measurements live in the dispatches and the /data/ ledger.