No matter how many times officials and market regulators remind investors of the risks the markets pose, they refuse to be deterred when they hear of other people making money.

Some people indeed have made money, when the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index rose by a stunning 49 percent from late November to its short-lived historical high of 2,994 points on January 24.

In the last two months of 2006, about 4.3 million new investors flocked to open stock market accounts, according to the Beijing-based CITIC Securities.

"The transaction has been huge lately," Wang Kai, a CITIC Securities investment strategist, told China Daily. "Sometimes the trading volume in a single day can match that for a whole month in the past."

The rapid swelling of liquidity "has led to signs of a bubble," according to Andy Xie, Morgan Stanley's former Asian chief economist, in an interview with the Chinese language press.

But will the market index continue to rise, and for how long will it continue to do so - before it becomes too dangerous to play the game?

For instance, will the index reach, as forecast by some overly optimistic analysts, as much as 4,000 points in a year? Or, is the market already building a bubble, as others say?

Besides all these technical questions, there is an even bigger question: The Chinese regulators have never had the experience of keeping the stock market steady when the index is at a relatively high level, like it is now. Will it do it this time? And how?

Frankly, the Chinese mainland has never had a stock market that worked like a market - it either erupted with a lot of investor enthusiasm but few worthy stocks, or went dormant with a lot of stocks and few interested investors.

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