China stock market crisis: what UK national newspapers think

Leader writers accuse Beijing of incompetence and urge calm on the home front

The great fall of China. It was a pun too good to miss for the Daily Mail (page 1), the Sun and the Times. It kept company with the most used clichi(C) of the day, the one about China sneezing and the rest of the world getting a cold.

In various guises, it appeared in the Guardian, Independent, Daily Express, Daily Mirror and the Sun. But the Sun deserves special mention for the pun over its editorial, Chinese burn.

"It is clear that China is slowing down much faster than anticipated... If the Chinese model really has run its course, the impact will be shattering. Yet the fundamentals that earned the label of the Chinese century are still largely in place.

What is needed is transparency. China must also let its markets function more freely and accelerate the shift from an export-led economy towards greater consumption at home... In the meantime there is no need to stockpile pickled cabbage or storm the ATMs."

"China is being forced to learn the hard way what traditional practitioners of market-based economics have known all along - that you cannot buck the markets and that economic development never proceeds in a straight line.

The belief that China's own peculiar form of authoritarian, state-sponsored capitalism could somehow defy the usual laws of economics always did look deluded."

"At the very least, its slowdown threatens to spark a rolling series of debt and currency crises in emerging markets... Small wonder that stock markets are panicking."

"It should be public about its conclusions, however much this may go against the grain. Markets and the wider world need confidence in the existence of a plan, given the absence of the monetary and fiscal tools common to market economies."

"Instead of soothing nerves, these measures only stirred new concerns about why they had been necessary at all. Beijing's grip on events loosened again in the eyes of the world after it allowed the yuan to slide over the last fortnight...

Beijing is certainly not out of options nor treasure just yet, and yet the world is losing its blind faith in the assumption that China's often-secretive political processes can in the end be relied on to steer the nation to ever-greater prosperity."

"Alarm bells should be ringing very loudly in Downing Street as the economic weather darkens. Instead, the Europe-obsessed Tories are focusing on renegotiating Britain's relationship with Brussels.

And Labour is mired in a chaotic leadership battle which is doing lasting damage to the party."