The Shanghai Composite Index on Bloomberg.com gives a nice year long perspective.

Here is the picture copied from their pages:

                                        

So you can see the "bounce" from the bottom last week and yet, still down drastically from the peak in October.  Looking back at a 3 year graph, one can see that the Shanghai market's composite index had never been above 2500 before late December 2007.  So the markets were getting a wee bit ahead of themselves. 

For one, there was nowhere else to put money, now the banks and individual mutual funds may invest abroad, which changes the whole landscape!

This post is to also refer back to last week's post here about government involvement in the stock markets.