Beijing: As market panic melted $1.5 trillion off the value of Chinese shares in two days, the People's Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party, had its attention elsewhere.
Its front page on Tuesday focused on economic development in Tibet, with no mention in any of the paper's 24 pages of the previous day's 8.5 per cent fall that had rocked world markets.
On Wednesday, there was more silence, this time after a 7.6 per cent fall. A page-two story reported the central bank's moves to cut rates, and Premier Li Keqiang's comments on global market volatility - but again there was no mention of the domestic turmoil gripping local investors. Even a brief story on the arrests of executives at a major securities firm only mentioned "illegal trading" and not the sharemarket.
"This tells us that this is a sensitive story to [the Communist Party] and they want to keep a lid on it," said David Bandurski, the editor of the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project, which analyses trends and controls in the mainland press. "There's not even an attempt at spin - they just want to avoid focus on the story altogether."
The People's Daily silence on the issue was notable, Bandurski said, because of its role as a "weathervane" of Chinese politics and economic policy.
"It's a reflection of consensus within the Party to some extent and it's where we look for the messages on policy and reporting."
The main 7pm China Central Television [CCTV] primetime national news broadcast has also skipped over reporting on the stock markets.
It jarred with the blanket coverage afforded to the crisis by the vast majority of China's state-controlled media, including city tabloids, financial newspapers and online news sites - though reportage refrained from criticising the central leadership's handling of the fallout.
It was a far cry, too, from April, when Chinese investors were still in the throes of a remarkable bull run, and Party-run newspapers openly encouraged investors to buy stocks. The People's Daily ran a prominent editorial proclaiming that 4000 points was "just the beginning" of a bull run. The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index did climb to over 5000 points, but by the close of Tuesday, it had crashed to under 3000. That editorial, and other pronouncements made by government authorities, remain a hot talking point - and source of anger - online.
"If you go back and do a play-by-play over the last six months, you can see the active role the leadership had in pushing this bubble," Bandurski said. "That's painful for them."
The silence could be interpreted as a sign of the heightened pressure on China's leaders to manage the fallout of a crumbling sharemarket and a slowing economy, or even a lack of consensus after a stop-start government sharemarket rescue package.
Or it could just be party media reflecting the party line. In explaining its rate cuts, the People's Bank of China made no mention of domestic market volatility. In short, nothing to see here.
Or as the People's Daily quoted Premier Li on page two: "The Chinese economy's overall stability has not changed."
