China's New stock cop

You can't really blame chen Xuesong for plowing his life savings into the stock market. It was the late 1990s, and Beijing was breathlessly exhorting mainlanders to buy shares as a way of boosting the economy and their own wealth. In 1999, the People's Daily cheerily declared that stocks would bring "happiness and hope" to the masses, and investors like Chen believed the hype. The 72-year-old retiree from Kunming in Yunnan province dropped $40,000 into stocks, surrounded himself with how-to books on beating the market and rigged up a computer in his bedroom so that he could watch himself grow rich...