I have been following the Chinese economy for the past 3 years, so I think I can provide some context:

Everything started when the US demand post 2013 waned, which started to put pressure on the Chinese export-dependent economy. Although US politicians like to proclaim US recovery, we can look at the data to see that US consumers have not recovered but are silently paying back debt (think Japan stagflation). This has created a surplus of reserve inventory in 2013-2014 as reports indicated abnormally large inventory. The Chinese economy continue to produce despite this. The fallout started about a year ago when people started to realize that the inventory is unsustainable. Around a year ago, coal and electric usage began to plunge and many China watcher began to signal a slowdown in the Chinese economy. This slowdown meant Chinese manufacturers no longer import commodities. This has led, in part, to the drop of commodity prices from oil to metal ores. This has also placed pressure on many developing nations that depends heavily on commodity export. Because of reduced global consumption, Chinese rhetoric has shifted toward domestic consumption. Domestic consumption has been picking up (around 60% growth), but it is not enough to compensate for the loss of global (read US + EU) demand.

This period of time also corresponded to major political crackdown from Wang YiShan's anti-corruption campaign and military reform from 7 regions to 5 regions. The central government also attempted to push through regulatory reform in the stock market by pushing for more market based system. All of this came falling apart when the Shanghai Composite dropped.

When the Chinese stock market crashed, the central government began to scale back its rhetoric on market reform but continue its emphasis on political reform. There has been considerable reduction in market based mechanism and political harassment of institution shareholder. Rumor suggests that the PBOC has been injecting directly into the stock market. All of this had a negative impact on Chinese consumer confidence as the wealthy began a series of capital flight out of RMB for foreign reserve. The inclusion of RMB in the SDR limits PBOC's ability to control capital flight. All of this has been worsened by many hedge fund's decision to capitalize on this via a series of carry trade by borrowing RMB and selling it on the market, which put further downward pressure on the RMB. At the moment it is known at least 10 hedge funds are "shorting" the RMB, some of which are utilizing over 85% of its fund capital. How much longer can PBOC continue to draw on its reserve (by selling Treasury securities and other investments) to support the RMB is remain to be seen...