Just three years ago, most Chinese startups were unheard of in the West, aside from search engine Baidu and online trading marketplace Alibaba, which were among the earlier wave of Internet startups to make a splash with successful public trading debuts.
Another part of the problem: Many traders, including a number of high frequency trading firms that normally make up 60% of daily trading volume, stepped aside and stopped buying, draining liquidity from the system when it was trying to deal with a tidal wave of sell orders.