There is a nervous hush in the dingy dealing rooms of Shanghai's retail stockbrokers as share prices on the display boards turn red. In China, that means they are going up.
The mood in these rooms, where so many dreams have been dashed, is a far cry from the days when waiters and delivery boys crowded in to stake their handfuls of yuan on the stock market.
"Individual investors are cautious," said Hu Jia, an analyst at Orient Securities, "and it's still hard to relate the index to the real economy."
Figures released last week showed that the Chinese recovery is still tentative. Exports fell 26.4% in May from a year earlier and imports were down by 22%.
"The government's stimulus package put 4 trillion yuan [£360 billion] into the economy and this had a huge impact on the stock market," said Hu.
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Bank lending doubled in May to £8.8 billion as state-owned banks opened the credit taps. The risks of more bad debts, asset bubbles and inflation seem to have been set aside.
The Shanghai composite index traces a dramatic graph - from the collapse of trade late last summer to the growing confidence among Chinese leaders now that they have come through the global crisis. The index plumbed a low last October at 1,664 and has climbed back to almost 2,800.
That is still a long way from its peak of 6,124 on October 17, 2007, a day remembered fondly by investors at Zheshang Securities, a small brokerage.
"Now fewer investors come every day," sighed a housewife, knitting as the trading screens pulsed with transactions.
The rally could run out of steam as up to 32 companies float this year. Nonetheless, most local analysts predict that China's policies will achieve its target of 8% growth in GDP.
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"Since economic reform began in 1978 no government target has been missed," said Hu, with a meaningful look. Strategists at HSBC expect China and Hong Kong to make the strongest recoveries among global markets.
Chinese leaders are also hearing a chorus of approval from establishment economists that suggests there will be no fundamental change to China's export-driven, low-wage, state-directed economic model.
"It will continue. It can't be changed," said Xie Baisan, a professor at Shanghai's Fudan University, who advises the state council, China's cabinet.
The leadership's sense that it has weathered the storm leaves little room for liberal factions inside the Communist party - or critics outside it. "The one-party system is our strength," said Xie. "There are no opposition parties or trade unions that go on strike. Look at General Motors - our way makes things simpler."
He reeled off a litany of statistics to prove the state council, in its wisdom, had forged a policy unique to China that will rescue the economy, improve living standards, modernise railways, roads, schools and hospitals, help farmers and put in place a social-security net.
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China, he said, was enjoying one of its historic eras of peace, stability, development and well-being comparable with only a few periods under enlightened emperors of the Han, Tang, Ming and Qing dynasties.
"You must not use western standards to measure China," he said. "China has far fewer troubles than other countries."
It was bracing to hear Andy Xie, an independent economist who once worked for Morgan Stanley, dissect the orthodox view over a £6.50 cup of coffee at the Four Seasons hotel, where recession is evidently not on the menu.
"The stimulus had a liquidity effect and a psychological effect on the stock market," he said, "but the market's view is wrong." Inventories had collapsed so far at the end of last year that buyers had to restock. Traders were mistaking this process for recovery.
Instead, he argued, there will be a "double dip" in the global recession and it will hit China hard next year. "You won't see the Kung Fu Panda effect. China is not going to lift the world - it accounts for only 8% of global GDP.
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"China's long-term problem is really about an economic model based on government power. China will not reform until the double dip," he said.
He drew a different moral from China's history to explain why officials still think they can manage the economy. "People come to China and say 'Oh, it's so complicated'. But it isn't. It's very simple. For so long there were just three classes - the emperor, the bureaucracy and the peasants. Now China has established a middle class but the government still acts like a monopoly."
Consumption will not rise until there is prosperity for the many. Urban wages are only 2,000 yuan (£180) a month.
Andy Xie writes a column for Caijing, a business magazine influential among liberal officials, in which he hammers away at the theme that the state is overmighty and its servants too powerful. "Even this hotel we're sitting in is owned by the state," he said. The state owns all the land and most of the listed companies, he added. It dictates interest rates and rigs the property market. Its mania for centralised control stifles local initiative.
The radical solution he proposes is mass privatisation and a smaller state.
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"All China needs to do is what Margaret Thatcher did, and it could boom for 10 years," he said.