The China Hustle

NOTHING China does surprises me.

This documentary put a lot of people in the hot seat- as it should. The only way to beat them is to expose them. Keep up the good fight!

It's downright criminal how they robbed people. How is this not like robbing a bank?

I definitely recommend this. It should be mandatory in our schools.

Z3

The least guilty part in this scam story, are the Chinese companies without a doubt.

Some smart *** wall street d*** heads, found some low life companies in China, and make them an offer for a merge, to able to get into US stock market. And all the rednecks, who have been manipulated and lost money, are crying out loud, by blaming China. ahhahaha

Guys, sorry but, if you offer the same thing, to any miserable, worthless company, in whole world, they would accept to get into this scam, without thinking twice.

The real bast***s to be damned in this story, are the wall street j*rks unfortunately, not China, or Chinese companies. Simply, US people are scamming other US people. Pathetic as hell.

Jed Rothstein does a bang-up job in bringing to cinematic life a recent but underreported massive fraud perpetrated on U.S. stock investors by unscrupulous Chinese companies and equally shady American brokers, auditors and lawyers. It is a timely documentary in this era where Republican domination of the federal government, and there absurd anti-regulation crusade merely encourage more such fleecing of the public.

Principal whistleblower here is a Pennsylvanian by way of Flint, Michigan (famed as the home of veteran movie muckraker Michael Moore) named Dan David, who declares at the outset of the show that there are no good guys depicted, himself included. He headed up an investment firm that helped push several new Chinese companies on the Big Board, only later to discover that their profits and vast growth were fictional.

The gimmick started with Reverse Mergers, whereby a company would merge into an SEC registered company of old that was inactive, say a 19th Century mining corporation. That trick circumvented the due diligence necessary for a new company to gain a stock listing, and creepy folks here in the U.S. took it from there.

Location footage shot secretly in China show how phony the supposdly booming companies actually were, and interviewees take us through the potentially dry financial machinations that come alive under Jed's direction. Dramatic highpoint occurs when former presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark walks off the set during his interview, rightfully realizing it will put him in a bad light as ex-CEO of one of the misbehaving investment banks.

Ultimately I suspect the ongoing wave of Republican party and right-wing propaganda will overwhelm this film or any other's message, in favor of advancing the shibboleths that ending government supervision (read: "interference") with the free market will solve all ills. Just as Trump so easily gets away (so far) with every outlandish denial or contradiction of the truth on a daily basis, such eye-opening exercises as this fact-filled documentary require a public willing to listen, something currently not in the cards.

The documentary highlights a little-known scam on the US stockmarket: the fraudulent sale of so-called "high growth" Chinese stocks through reverse takeovers of so-called shell companies. In itself that story would have been worthy of consideration. However, the producers and director have elected to weave this into a critical narrative of capitalism and the US economic institutions which distracts from the main story. One of the highlights of the movie is when they document how little US banks, regulators, stockbrokers, investors, etc. knew about China in the first place. This story was not so much about the corruption or weakness of US institutions against the alleged malevolence of scheming Chinese (and American) stock-pushers, but about the ignorance of Americans about the rest of the world. I'm holding my breath about the sequel to come about the next wave of sham investments about India, Africa, or another place Americans know little about.

Great story potential but the direction of the documentary ran off into weird areas and kind of lost the plot. Also, the attempt to simplify the story so a 10 year old could understand it meant everything took a very long time to explain. I'm a stockmarket fanatic but I couldn't finish this one. Really disappointing as I was interested in the methods being used to monitor the Chinese companies and all I got was CCTV footage showing a lack of trucks - kind of understandable though considering that monitoring private companies in China is a jailable offence. I wanted more than just claims that capitalism is a flawed system and that Americans can be greedy, I knew all that before watching.