For decades, China's capital controls served as a kind of financial border wall, keeping domestic wealth tethered to domestic soil. Now, in a measured but consequential policy turn, Beijing is lowering that wall — and Chinese investors, from individuals to institutions, are stepping through it into US equity markets at a pace not seen in years. The move reflects both the pragmatism of a government that prefers to manage its citizens' appetite for foreign assets through official channels and the deeper logic of a globalizing financial world in which no major economy can remain an island indefin