Beijing: As market panic melted $1.5 trillion off the value of Chinese shares in two days, the People's Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party, had its attention elsewhere.

Its front page on Tuesday focused on economic development in Tibet, with no mention in any of the paper's 24 pages of the previous day's 8.5 per cent fall that had rocked world markets.

On Wednesday, there was more silence, this time after a 7.6 per cent fall. A page-two story reported the central bank's moves to cut rates, and Premier Li Keqiang's comments on global market volatility - but again there was no mention of the domestic turmoil gripping local investors. Even a brief story on the arrests of executives at a major securities firm only mentioned "illegal trading" and not the sharemarket.

"This tells us that this is a sensitive story to [the Communist Party] and they want to keep a lid on it," said David Bandurski, the editor of the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project, which analyses trends and controls in the mainland press. "There's not even an attempt at spin - they just want to avoid focus on the story altogether."