A patriotic Chinese should support their countries' stock when they are going to drop. Well, at least the propaganda said. Because most large firm in China are either state-owned, or having large portion of stock owned by state.

Anyway, Chinese government banned some large stock holder to sell their stock in previous nearly happened financial crisis. It's a terrorism against Chinese government if you do that.

Your average person even in the US feels that there is something unsavory about short selling, like they are saboteurs, gleefully profiting off destruction. Even people you'd expect to be more sophisticated feel this way; I don't want to bring up one company in particular that inspires a lot of weird conspiratorial thinking about short sellers in tech-person-type settings.