BEIJING (AP) — Three months ago, a brief reverse for China's sizzling stock markets that saw prices tumble nearly 9 percent in a day set off a global shock wave, dragging down markets from Hong Kong to New York before they all bounced back.But over the past week, as official efforts to cool China's market boom sent prices spiralling downward again, international investors have been largely unruffled. Tokyo and Hong Kong stocks have gained and markets in New York, Sydney and Seoul have climbed to new records in recent days.

The difference? This time around, analysts say, investors had plenty of warning that China's record-high prices might fall and learned from February's drop that Chinese volatility had little impact on its economy or foreign markets.

"There was plenty of warning. People knew Chinese authorities wanted to stabilise the market. But they saw the market would have no effect abroad," said Yiping Huang, chief Asia economist for Citigroup.

With China's growing global economic clout, the 8.8 percent plunge in the Shanghai stock index on February 27 may have triggered a knee-jerk reaction among investors looking for an excuse to bail out of markets that had risen rapidly in previous months.

But investors have since realised that China's equity markets are largely walled off from global capital flows. Most Chinese shares are off-limits to foreign investors. Financial controls bar most ordinary Chinese from buying foreign stocks and bonds.

A plunge in Chinese stocks also isn't seen as having a major impact on the nation's economic growth, which is largely driven by exports. China's markets serve largely to raise money for state companies, not the vibrant private sector.

"What people are looking at is a market that really is walled off and enclosed. Therefore, it tends to move to its own beat," said Andrew Foster, a portfolio manager with San Francisco-based Matthews International Management. "We're learning that the spill-over effects, at least initially, are quite contained."

Several factors unrelated to the plunge in Chinese shares also contributed the global sell-off in late February and early March, economists say. Investors were rattled when former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan suggested that a US recession was possible later this year. They were nervous about tension over Iran's nuclear programme.

The yen's appreciation at that time also led to concerns about a decline in the yen carry-trade, a popular investment tool that involves borrowing the yen at Japan's low interest rates to invest in higher-yielding, often riskier assets elsewhere.

With the yen weaker now against the dollar — above 121 yen instead of around 115 yen three months ago — there's less worry that investors will reverse those carry trades, a move that could hurt liquidity world-wide.

The latest plunge in Chinese shares was triggered by Beijing's decision last Wednesday to triple the tax on stock trades from 0.1 percent to 0.3 percent.

The move was the most aggressive action by authorities anxious to cool a surging market that had risen more than 50 percent so far this year after soaring 130 percent in 2006.

The rapid gains have been fueled by millions of first-time investors who dipped into their savings, mortgaged apartments and tapped retirement accounts to buy stocks. Financial analysts said the rise was partly justified by strong increases in corporate profits, but authorities warned that novices could be hurt if prices fell.

China's newest retail investors have certainly gotten a taste of market volatility over the last week, with the Shanghai Composite Index plunging nearly 13 percent from its record high of 4,334.92 on May 29.

Still, the index is up 41 percent since the start of the year.

Economists say Chinese leaders have struggled with competing pressures as they try to stamp out frenzied speculation while keeping the markets growing. State newspapers are urging small investors to pick their stocks carefully and promising them the tax hike will make the market healthier in the long run by discouraging speculation.

On Tuesday, the government tried to stanch panicked selling by announcing that four new investment funds had been approved to enter the market, a step that would inject fresh capital.

"The government did not expect the market fall to be so sharp and worried the market could be out of control," said Zhang Gang, a market strategist for the brokerage Central China Securities. "The government needs a bull market to serve the capital-raising needs of some big companies in the future."

Yesterday, small investors appeared to be cashing out while pension funds and other institutional investors bought shares, said Zhang.

Wang Sheng, a strategist for Haitong Securities, said he had heard unconfirmed rumours that the government was pressing institutions to buy shares Tuesday to prop up prices.

Still, he said, "I expect the market will resume its downward trend in the near future", with the Shanghai index falling as low as 3,000.

Big stock market losses could cause some families to cut back on household spending, economists say, but so far there is no sign of that happening. Citigroup's Huang said a 10 percent fall in share prices would result in a 1 percent fall in the growth rate of Chinese retail sales — a figure that the government says is expanding by 15 percent a year.

"That's not insignificant, but it's not a big problem," he said.

Global fund managers have trimmed exposure to Chinese stocks this year, reducing holdings by about 15 percent so far — most of that within the last four weeks.

There was $2.41 billion of outflows from China-listed stocks since January, according to EPFR Global, a Boston-based firm that tracks global fund flow data. There is about $18 billion of foreign cash in Chinese stocks, mostly from mutual funds.

On Wall Street, fund managers took February's drop as a lesson that volatility is common in China and that US and European investors needed to adjust to changes in how the world's financial markets relate to one another.

"Every year the US is becoming a smaller part of the world relative to other countries," said Komal Sri-Kumar, chief global strategist at Los Angeles-based financial firm TCW. "And investors are having to adapt the way they trade."