China experienced a bizarre numerological happening this week. The Shanghai Composite Index started yesterday morning at 2346.98, which, when read from right to left, shares an uncanny similarity to yesterday’s highly sensitive anniversary: twenty-three years since the June 4, 1989, crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing, an event known in Chinese as “six-four.” Just a coincidence? Six hours later, the numbers struck again: the market closed the day down 64.89 points. The reaction was instantaneous: Chinese online comments tended toward the cosmological (“Maybe God does exist?” someone wrote), but the government was not amused, and it raced to censor microblog discussion, blocking references to “Shanghai Composite Index” and the offending digits. (Censors also blocked “candle,” “tank,” “never forget,” and scores of other terms.)

What would you think if I told you that a contingent of sixty-four American middle-schoolers was barred from the vicinity of Tiananmen Square yesterday until organizers agreed to break it into smaller groups of inoffensive numbers? Or that a team of Ukrainian volleyball players applying for visas was rejected from the Chinese embassy in Kiev yesterday when a clerk noticed a suspicious cluster of forms all listed with heights of six feet four inches? Or that a conference in Beijing hosted by C.G.C. Investments was forced to remove all signage after officials deemed the initials C.G.C. to be an unwanted reminder of Chen Guangcheng, the blind dissident who sought refuge in the U.S. Embassy last month?

Stop! The paragraph above is nonsense. The Shanghai stock story is all true, but I made up the three sentences after that. Why? Because you now know exactly how it feels to be a Chinese news consumer these days, beset by a culture of information in which politics, paranoia, and security have combined in ways that make it impossible to distinguish fact from fiction. And that problem goes a long way to explaining why Chinese officials and executives face a growing crisis of credibility at home and abroad.

Take the Shanghai stock case. There are several possible explanations: It was a coincidence; it was hacked; or, it was manipulated. If it had happened in the United States or Europe, we would know soon enough what was behind it. (Odds are on a coincidence at the moment, though I have to wonder if somebody didn’t meddle with it.) But I’m reminded of a good point by my friend Jim Fallows, who once said of Chinese official paranoia that the government either is overreacting or it knows more than it’s letting on.

In either case, however, discussion has been squelched, and that means that Chinese investors—and anyone else with an interest in the credibility of Chinese markets—may never know if a major Chinese stock exchange is possessed, corrupt, or undefended.

Photograph by Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images.