This post is part of our feature on Money Winners of 2008. See all 20.

It wasn't like Michael Phelps hadn't done well for himself by the time he got into the swimming pool at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He was pulling in between $4 and $5 million a year after winning six gold medals in the 2004 Athens Olympics. And was already a sports marketer's wet dream, so to speak.

But then he went and broke Marc Spitz's 36-year record by winning eight gold medals, and the real race was on: to break out as the first $100 million Olympian.

Or at least that's what his managers and agent were saying. Measuring the precise wealth of sports stars is something of an art. Most of their great wealth comes from corporate endorsement deals, which are often heralded more as approximations than exact hard figures.

"We are poor."

That's exactly how numerous Chinese in the southern Henan Province start conversations according to today's New York Times article about China: "Lives of Grinding Poverty, Untouched by China's Boom."

While the article contents that China has, more so than any other country, moved people out of poverty, there are still 300 million poor in China.

We've seen a booming Chinese stock market. The iShares FTSE/Xinhua China 25 Index (NYSE: FXI), a popular index of the 25 largest Chinese companies available to foreign investors, was up over 60% in 2007. While we've seen a strong pullback, Beijing is hosting the 2008 Olympics and continued focus and interest on China as an international investment destination should continue as a rising middle class in China spends on consumer products, travel, and electronics.

So PetroChina (NYSE:PTR) went public in Shanghai to great fanfare and now the company has a market-cap of over $1 trillion. This gives the company a valuation greater than that of both General Electric (NYSE: GE) and Exxon Mobil (NYSE: XOM) combined. Not bad considering the company has revenues of just 1/4 that of Exxon. With all due respect to the growth of the Chinese economy, this is a bit ridiculous. Can we even believe the numbers they are reporting? We all talk about the lack of transparency in U.S. corporate earnings (see financial stocks of late); it's 100 times worse in China.

The Chinese stock market has had an amazing run, but what comes up must come down. With all the recent IPO's that have skyrocketed, it sure has the feel of NASDAQ 2000 all over again. Then people used to invest if the ticker symbol had 4 letters. Now people will throw money at anything that has to do with China. Irrational exuberance? You bet!

Will the communist government of China allow the stock market to fall before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing? Probably not, but a bubble has been created and investors should better be forewarned.