Via Asia Economy Watch:

A senior Chinese official said Friday that China’s State Council will soon decide how to put into practice a plan for the government to purchase equities in order to restore confidence in the nation’s equities markets.
He said it was not a bail-out and pointed out that Hong Kong made a large profit selling shares it had bought in a similar plan to rescue its stock market during the Asian financial crisis of 1998.

Flashback: When Hong Kong bought stock in 1998 it was to hit speculators who were betting that the SAR and mainland would delink the HK dollar and renminbi from the US dollar, thereby allowing their currencies to follow those of the rest of the region downward. The press release is here.

Presently, no one is speculating that the renminbi will be revalued downward. The currency situation is diametrically opposite to that of 1998. The speculation is that any revaluation will go the other way. If there was confidence in the market - at the very least a belief that it had bottomed - than those few foreign investors that are allowed to buy Mainland shares would likely be doing so simply as a currency play.

And - despite hitting eight-year lows recently - in terms of  price-earnings valuations Mainland China’s sharemarkets are still overvalued in comparison to those of Hong Kong and elsewhere.

Still, if they do bail out the stock market in a direct manner, it may be better than the piecemeal measures that have been taken. Moreover it would be welcome over some of the ones that have been alleged:

…a mysterious rise in the value of the three pilot companies chosen to
begin the experiment of divesting their state-owned stocks suggested
that the government was attempting to prop them up.

But no one should pretend it is anything other than a bail out.