The top journalists in China are noted for ‘hyping up the unemployment rate’ | World news
A prominent Chinese financial journalist who has compared the country’s economic problems to the Great Depression has been banned from social media.
The Weibo account of Wu Xiaobo, an influential business journalist and author with more than 4.7 million followers, “is currently in a banned state for violating relevant laws and regulations”, according to the banner. that appeared on his page on Tuesday.
Content regulators on Weibo – a Twitter-like platform – said on Monday they had blocked three users confirmed for “spreading smears against the development of the security market” and “inflating the unemployment rate”.
Weibo did not give the full usernames of the blocked accounts, but said one of them had a three-character name starting with “Wu” and ending with “Bo”.
China’s post-Covid economic recovery has fizzled, with lackluster data in recent weeks suggesting the recovery is running out of steam.
Wu’s Weibo page appeared on Tuesday to have deleted all content posted since April 2022.
Wu did not immediately respond to AFP’s request for comment.
His regular blog on the website of Chinese financial magazine Caixin has long detailed the country’s economic woes, including a declining birthrate and rising youth unemployment.
“The high unemployment rate is likely to become the fuse that ignites the powder,” he wrote in a May paper comparing the situation to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
In another recent book, he asked whether monetary easing would be able to “solve the current economic problems”.
Those columns, however, had not been removed from the internet as of Tuesday.
China’s domestic media is state-controlled, and widespread censorship of social media is often used to suppress negative stories or critical coverage.
Regulators have already urged investors to avoid reading foreign news reports about China, while analysts and economists have been suspended from social media for taking pessimistic views.
