[2][3][4] Many of the film's protagonists such as Dan David and Jon Carnes are activist shareholders and due diligence professionals who discovered the frauds, including fabricated accounting and brazen misrepresentations, and subsequently shorted the stock in order to bring about the collapse of the entities which often led to class action lawsuits, NASDAQ delistment, and SEC deregistration.

The documentary features interviews with investment bankers, whistleblowers like Dan David, who, after reading reports by the due diligence firm Muddy Waters Research, decided to short many hyped up penny stocks based in China.

[18] It also features interviews with journalists from Wall Street Journal and New York Times, Mitchell Nussbaum, the lawyer from Loeb & Loeb who represented the Chinese firms featured in the film, the investment banker who sold shares and issued "buy" recommendations on these stocks to his clients, retired U.S. Army General Wesley Clark, who was chairman of Rodman & Renshaw, another firm selling these stocks, and Paul Gills (a professor at Peking University).

It's also an examination of a clash of business cultures – the gung-ho superficiality of the U.S., the dedication to opacity of China (as the saying goes, in clear water there is no fish) – and the depressing reality that the people making money out of all this are doing more to fix this system than the entities supposedly charged with oversight.

"[27] Ben Kenigsberg of the New York Times wrote that "with a rapidly paced barrage of talking heads and TV clips," "a documentary may simply be the wrong delivery mechanism for a byzantine exposé that cries out for detailed news reporting.

"[29] Scott Tobias of Variety wrote: "The China Hustle” occasionally slides into the issue-doc template of talking heads and power-points, but it excels at drawing bar-stool anecdotes from financial rogues like David, ex-Bond employee Matthew Wiechert, and Carson Block, who runs a short-selling operation called Muddy Waters Research.