The dirty little secret is that trading on insider information is absolutely rife in the Chinese market among anyone who's above the bottom few rungs of society.
You can just look at the average returns of the non-peons to see that they're unlikely to be using insider trading.
When I was at university, a meaningful percentage of my Chinese classmates' parents had paid for their expensive overseas tuition by making 'informed' investments in the stock market, and thought nothing of it. Bribery and insider trading (stock tips are effectively one form of bribery) are absolutely the standard in China.
Parent didn’t mention anything about the aspect being binary. You can inside trade in the USA, and unless you are a member of Congress, the SEC will likely go after you (eventually). So people don’t do it with anywhere near as much impunity as it is done in China.
