The Shanghai stock market has been, for most of this year, the best-performing stock market in the world. But foreigners have very little access to it, and local investors have very little alternative to it: China's financial markets remain closed, opaque, and underdeveloped. From this primitive base, can Shanghai possibly transform itself into a global financial centre by 2020, as Beijing has decreed?

It is hard to find any financial professional in Shanghai who is willing to bet on it. “You can't even short the market,” says one exasperated analyst for a foreign investment bank. Beijing announced late last year that it would introduce short selling and margin trading on a limited basis – ironically, at exactly the moment that many western exchanges were halting or restricting short selling. But since then nothing has happened. It is a common pattern: Beijing announces that it is ready to introduce one financial innovation or another – and then nothing happens.

Financial futures are the clearest example of an innovation that, though much trumpeted, so far has not happened: Shanghai created a financial futures exchange nearly three years ago, but it has yet to trade a product. Officials say they expect trading to begin later this year – but then, the imminent launch of Shanghai stock index futures trading has been predicted before, and failed to materialise.