THE lads loitering in front of the screens at one of Beijing's many new gambling dens are wearing shorts and thongs. It could almost be a TAB in Sydney or Melbourne - except the thongs are worn with grey nylon socks.
A 30-something man named Ma has punted most of his wealth on a land developer called Yinji Fazhan. He does not want his full name in print because he should be at work. In any case, he says, his share investment is a breach of company policy.
Sharemarket punters everywhere else in the world are getting smashed.
In Sydney a few hours earlier the Australian Stock Exchange posted a 10 per cent official "correction". But Ma's stock has just hit a new high of 12.25 yuan ($2.03) on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. He has lost count of how much money he has made.
But shouldn't he diversify his investments?
"No, I invest in one company because I don't know much about the market and don't have time to do the homework," he says.
Isn't he concerned that the world's financial convulsions will find their way to China?
"It won't greatly affect the market here," he says. "There will be ups and downs, but the trend will keep rising until the Olympics, and then I will sell."
Overnight, Ma and an army of savings-rich retail investors has levered China into the financial big league.
Last Monday, despite bloodshed everywhere else and news that inflation had hit 5.6 per cent in China, the Shanghai Composite Index hit a new record high of 4840. It has risen nearly 500 per cent since July 2005, making every other big market look lifeless by comparison.
The combined market capitalisation of Shanghai and its sister bourse in the southern city of Shenzhen has hit 21trillion yuan - six times higher than only 20 months ago.
The red-hot market means China is on target to lead the world in new floats this year. And its large listed companies have jumped from nowhere into the top global tier.
The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China is now the world's biggest bank - at least on a crude multiplication from the Shanghai share price.
Some expect PetroChina will become the world's largest company bar none - after a Shanghai float later this year.
It is hard to imagine a more stunning turnaround.
Only two years ago the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges were sick, mistrusted and ignored. In 2005 the only sure place to lose more money was in Tehran.
The problem was not the economy - which was roaring - and it was not the lack of profitable companies or potential investors. The problem was the market itself.
The Chinese market may still seem a frontier of manipulation, insider trading and corporate theft, but it is light years ahead of where it was.
In June last year the first criminal laws were enacted to prevent controlling shareholders from misappropriating company funds. Three months later 309 companies had recovered 20.4 billion yuan, and a bevy of executives had been prosecuted.
Most importantly, authorities have successfully neutralised the state-owned share "overhang" problem. Two-thirds of listed company shares were locked up by state-owned entities, causing investors to fear they would one day be dumped on the market causing share prices to slump.
Authorities have unlocked those shares without causing panic by offering hugely generous compensation to minority shareholders. The result is that investors no longer live in fear, and corporate managers are more responsive because they are now exposed to possible takeover threats if they do not perform.
"The reforms sparked off the boom that continues today," says Ted Rule, an Australian analyst in Shenzhen.
There are other rational reasons for the disconnection between China's euphoria and the recent global bloodbath.
The Chinese market is insulated by tight foreign investment restrictions. Conversely, Chinese investors have money to burn but almost nowhere else to put it. Foreign markets are out of bounds, while real interest rates on local bank deposits are substantially less than zero.
Also, company profits are phenomenally strong. The latest round of interim profit reports are up 82.3 per cent, Xinhua news agency reports.
So a large part of the two-year, five-fold market climb is due to cleaner and more profitable companies operating in a better functioning market.
The remainder, it seems, is old-fashioned market madness.
But the concept of a bubble bursting makes no sense to tens of millions of small Chinese investors who have come to know nothing but phenomenal paper profits.
At the height of excitement in May more than 300,000 new accounts being opened across China every day. How many of the 100 million-odd accounts are actively traded is anybody's guess. But Shanghai's trading volume rose 640 per cent in the year to the March quarter, before slipping after government measures to slow things down.
Back at the modest Merchant Securities trading house in downtown Beijing, where Ma is skipping work to watch his money grow, there is a small sign warning that share trading carries risks. Nobody seems to have read it.
The local hero is a man called Yuan Lin, who has an adjoining VIP advisory office. He is said to have borrowed 8000 yuan in 1989 and turned it into 2 billion yuan today. Local business portals say this "stock god" is "better than Buffett" because his annual returns are four times as great (98 per cent versus 22.6).
In Yuan's recently published book, a "bubble" is something to be exploited, not feared.
"A bubbling market is my best chance to make money," he writes. If the word bust is written anywhere then it is well concealed.
When the bubble does burst China will temporarily lose some of its new-found financial clout. Nevertheless, today's inflated valuations provide a handy preview of things to come. In the coming decade the world financial system and global economy will be shaped by the sheer weight of Chinese capital, rather than Chinese manufactured goods.
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