Chinese propaganda officials have ordered financial journalists and media outlets to tone down their coverage of a liquidity crunch in the interbank market, in a sign of how worried Beijing is that the turmoil will continue when markets reopen today. Short-term interest rates for loans in the interbank market shot up last week in an apparent repeat of the cash crunch in June that panicked investors and exposed weaknesses in China’s debt-laden financial markets.

Money market rates surged again on Friday even after China’s central bank announced on Thursday evening that it had carried out “short-term liquidity operations” to alleviate the problem.

That prompted the central bank to publish a longer and more specific statement on Friday, in which it said it had injected Rmb300bn ($49bn) in targeted cash infusions to individual banks in recent days.