China’s market is broken. Not the way the New York Stock Exchange broke for four hours on Wednesday, and not merely because China’s government is doing everything short of sending in tanks to make shares go up. It is broken because the indices everyone uses to measure the market are entirely disconnected from what’s actually happening.

Consider the ChiNext Composite, an index of 484 supposedly fast-growing companies on Shenzhen’s ChiNext market. The index rose 2.9 per cent on Thursday, a welcome relief after a 43 per cent fall in less than a month.

But as a measure it makes China’s official statisticians look like paragons of virtue. There are 192 stocks on ChiNext still trading, and every single one is up on Thursday by the daily limit of 10 per cent. The index is measuring something which doesn’t exist any more — an imaginary market where virtually all the shares are available to trade.