China’s stockmarket nightmare is nowhere near over

Running China’sCSRC securities watchdog is a perilous job. A market rout can end your career, or worse. On February 7th, after weeks of , Yi Huiman, the head of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (), was suddenly fired and replaced. He is not the first official to fall after a period of plummeting stock prices. Liu Shiyu, his predecessor, was sacked in 2019, and later investigated for corruption. Xiao Gang, the boss before that, was treated as a scapegoat for the market crash in 2015.Before his dismissal, Mr Yi would have been aware that he was on dangerous ground. Already this year, more than $1trn in market value has been wiped from exchanges in China and Hong Kong. On February 5th the Shanghai Composite plummeted to a five-year low. All told, the index is down by more than a fifth since early 2022. And as miserable as the performance of Chinese stocks has been for most of their three-decade history, the present downturn feels different.