That hiss you hear is the sound of air escaping from the Chinese stock markets.

Like many Chinese, I’m keeping an eye on the markets these days because so many experts seem to think they are in the grip of speculative mania.

Well some of that mania is hissing away. The main market indexes began to fall last week. On Monday, they collapsed 8.3 percent. By mid-day today, they were down nearly six percent.

The markets have taken quite a tumble. The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index is now down more than 20 percent since it reached a high of 4334 on May 29th. Can you understand Ouch! in Chinese?

Some Chinese are taking it as a buying opportunity. After all, the markets are still up about 30 percent on the year.

But there may be more air in that bubble.

Item: I apologize for the sudden change of appearance of the blog. A number of McClatchy foreign correspondents are launching blogs collectively in the next week, and tech people are trying to standardize the appearance. Something went wrong in the coding of this blog. We'll try to get it back to normal soon.