Running China’s securities watchdog is a perilous job. A market rout can end your career, or worse. On Feb 7, after weeks of stock market instability, Mr Yi Huiman, the head of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), was suddenly fired and replaced. He is not the first official to fall after a period of plummeting stock prices. Mr Liu Shiyu, his predecessor, was sacked in 2019 and later investigated for corruption. Mr 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 in 2024, more than US$1 trillion (S$1.34 trillion) in market value has been wiped from exchanges in China and Hong Kong. On Feb 5, 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.