The Hushen 300 index was launched Friday to evaluate the overall performance of China's two stock markets, the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

The index, combining the two stock exchanges for the first time to reflect the total fluctuation of China's stock markets, opened at 984.66 points on Friday morning.

For a long time China's two stock exchanges had separate indices to appraise yuan-denominated A shares and foreign-currency B shares, as well as their own composite indices to evaluate the overall performance of the two markets individually.

About one fifth of the total shares listed in the two markets have been chosen as samples of the new index, accounting for about60 percent of the market value in China's stock market.