Repeat after me: The stock market is not the economy. And the economy is not the stock market.

That’s the central, crucial idea for sound economic policy that seems to be missing from China’s frantic efforts to prop up its plummeting stock market. Those efforts weren’t enough to stop the swoon in prices last week, though they were enough to generate a couple of up days in a week of wild market swings.

The Shanghai composite index actually finished the week up 5 percent after the government’s extensive interventions, but remains down 25 percent from its June 12 high. Even that is misleading, as trading was halted earlier in the week in hundreds of Chinese stocks, freezing the price of shares that represent about 40 percent of the market value. No doubt these are scary times in China. It is understandable that government and industry leaders fear what the collapse will do to the savings of the country’s growing middle class, who have taken to stock investing in mass numbers in recent years.

It is easy to understand why the headlines out of China would make the rest of the world fret. China is an important global economic player. Persistent uncertainty about what will happen to Greece and the eurozone, another major driver of the world economy, has further fueled the sense of global markets in peril.

To the degree that the loss of stock market wealth will ripple through to the broader credit system and economy, it makes sense for Chinese officials to be alarmed. Perhaps losses on margin loans will cause credit to freeze up more broadly, slowing growth. Or the loss of paper wealth could lead Chinese citizens to hunker down and spend less money, leading to a recession.