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For investors, China’s stock market crash is another worrying development in an already-fraught global economy. But for China’s ruling Communist Party, the crash could very well represent an existential threat.

The scale of China’s response to the crash, which has wiped out 30 per cent of its stock markets’ value in less than a month, shows that the Communist Party is afraid of losing control. The bubble, after all, is one of the government’s own making. State media reports had endlessly touted the benefits of equity investing to ordinary Chinese in the months leading up to the crash, and Beijing staked its prestige on what had become the world’s hottest stock markets.

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The crash has left officials in Beijing, so used to enacting total control of every aspect of China’s economy, looking ineffective. Worse, investors see their seemingly desperate responses as worsening the panic.

“If the supposedly omnipotent Communist Party have shown such ineptitude with regard to stock markets, who’s to say the same thing won’t happen with the wider economy?” said Jasper Lawler, market analyst at CMC Markets. “If China’s authorities do lose control of the economy, it will have huge negative implication for global growth, and by implication global stock markets.”