If Chinese equities were an instantaneous barometer of Zheng Shanjie’s success in communicating the Party’s determination to leverage fiscal stimulus in the service of resuscitating the wheezing mainland economy, he failed in real-time.

Zheng runs China’s National Development and Reform Commission. Actually, Xi Jinping runs China’s National Development and Reform Commission, but you know what I mean. When the NDRC scheduled a press conference for Tuesday, A-shares’ first day back from the Golden Week holiday, expectations were high. Surely, the thinking went, Zheng (and Xi) understood the stakes.

Chinese equities ran 30% to 40% higher on stimulus hopes over the last several weeks, and PBoC chief Pan Gongsheng did his part. Pan’s press conference on September 24 was all about specifics, and that’s what investors and everyday Chinese need right now: Specifics. Not a belabored recap of recent events, not hackneyed reassurances that China’s “fundamentals” are strong and certainly not a recitation of Xi’s favorite platitudes. Anything but that.

Well, guess what? Zheng’s big event was long on hackneyed reassurances and platitudes and short on specifics. As I put it Monday, previewing the NDRC event, the fate of China’s mega-rally was in the balance. The NDRC was “supposed” to unveil trillions of yuan in fiscal support. Instead, Zheng offered that China would pull forward CNY100 billion of federal spending to complement an additional CNY100 billion of “strategic” investment. Other than that, his remarks were little more than a recap of previously-announced measures.

Long story short: Markets expected to hear CNY2 trillion at minimum. Zheng gave everyone CNY200 billion. It’d be funny if it weren’t… you know what? It’s funny. No caveats.

Zheng talked up consumption vouchers for the needy, and alluded to ongoing ultra-long issuance with the proceeds earmarked for economic support. Those are good ideas — China desperately needs some kind of helicopter money and there are high-profile calls for expanded special bond issuance to fund huge demand-side stimulus — but the (anyway limited) cash handouts Zheng mentioned were announced last month and he stopped well short of a “whatever it takes” moment vis-à-vis future bond sales.

The verdict from H-shares was poor indeed. As the figure below shows, Hong Kong-listed Chinese shares plunged double-digits. It was the worst day since 2008 and one of the worst sessions ever.

“We are fully confident in achieving the annual economic and social development targets,” Zheng told the Chinese press. Suffice to say stocks were unconvinced. Commodities took a hit from Zheng’s underwhelming performance too. That’s perhaps even more telling than Hong Kong’s very bad day.

Feel free to chuckle. Because, as noted above, it’s undeniably funny. The Party’s approach to local equities is famously slapstick. For a political machine pathologically averse to manifestations of capitalistic excess, Beijing periodically stokes and countenances cartoonish expressions of froth only to torpedo the whole thing, either on purpose — when the shadow of the bubble they stoked starts to scare them — or accidentally — because they don’t understand how to talk to markets. The monumental rally witnessed since mid-September, and Tuesday’s crash in Hong Kong, is just the latest example.

Note that you can’t judge Zheng’s press event by mainland equities. They were coming off a weeklong holiday. That is: A-shares were playing catch up after the long break. They were virtually guaranteed to rise. In a testament to markets’ disappointment with the NDRC event, the CSI 300 was up 10% at the open. By the close, the gain was just half that.

If you watched Zheng’s remarks as a Westerner, he came across as wholly comedic: A stone-faced Party functionary, indistinguishable from an automaton, droning on about nothing in a monotone against the offensively — blindingly — blue backdrop Xi’s bureaucrats always use for these sorts of events (and every other sort of event now that you mention it).

Alicia Garcia Herrero, an economist at Natixis quoted by Bloomberg, captured it well. “I don’t know what the NDRC was thinking with this,” she said.