New year’s events can be anticlimactic. Not so in China where stock markets began 2016 with enough excitement to make traders choke on their bubbles: Shanghai stocks dropped 7 per cent on Monday, Shenzhen more than 8 per cent. It could have been worse. A new mechanism that suspends trading after a drop of 7 per cent halted play early — in this instance, by an hour and a half.

There are no such circuit breakers in Hong Kong where the H-share index of mainland equities fell less than 4 per cent on unremarkable volumes. One might have expected more of a bloodletting. Mainland retail investors participate in both markets — a function both of Stock Connect and a leaky system — and if you can’t sell what you would like, you sell what you can. Foreign H-share investors too might be presumed sellers, having been the most bearish on China’s economy. Yet yesterday, even as Shanghai opened down a further 3 per cent (before rebounding), Hong Kong’s H shares remained resilient.

The clue may be in the price: the H-share index is cheap. On seven times 2016 earnings, it trades at a lower multiple than Spain (with 22 per cent unemployment), Brazil (dependent upon commodities and thus China), and both Turkey and Egypt, affected by Middle Eastern turmoil.