On Sunday, the new graduates of Tsinghua University are set to gather in their smartest attire to celebrate degrees from one of China’s most prestigious institutions, a place that has fostered generations of political leaders. Just after the ceremony starts — according to a written agenda — the graduates must “follow the instruction and shout loudly the slogan, ‘revive the A shares, benefit the people; revive the A shares, benefit the people’.”

To outsiders, this may seem a curious sentiment with which to send China’s best and brightest forward into their careers. More commonly, the tropes of patriotic education are concerned with issues such as national unity and strength, socialist ideology, the recapturing of China’s past glories and washing away a century of shame inflicted by imperialist Japan and western powers.

But the elevation of A shares into this rarefied pantheon of national priorities hints at the centrality of the battle that Beijing has joined to restore calm to its slumping stock markets and, in the process, revive its own credibility. This is because the A-share rout risks something much bigger than lost investments; the Communist party’s basic definition of how power and the people are supposed to interact is also in jeopardy.