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China is ramping up a crackdown on financial sector commentators, a move that erodes the space for independent analysis and data and challenges Beijing’s official narrative of the health of the world’s second-biggest economy.
Wu Xiaobo, one of China’s most prominent economic commentators with nearly 5mn followers on Weibo, was blocked on Monday alongside two unnamed writers, said the owner of the Twitter-like platform.
Sino Weibo, the social media platform’s owner, deleted Wu’s recent posts and said he had spread harmful information that undermined government policy, including manipulating unemployment rates and spreading false accusations against the securities market.
The decision to block Wu recalled a campaign launched in 2021 by the Cyberspace Administration of China to silence market sceptics and stifle pessimistic opinions about the Chinese economy. Last year, Hong Hao, an outspoken Chinese market strategist, was ousted from state-owned brokerage BoCom International over his bearish market commentaries.
The latest crackdown comes against a backdrop of rising concern over China’s rocky recovery from President Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policies. Six months after authorities unwound pandemic restrictions, growth has struggled to take off, hampered by property sector weakness, slower than expected consumer spending and trade headwinds.
Youth unemployment hit a record hit 20.8 per cent last month, as the government struggled to find jobs for young people to drive the recovery.
China’s benchmark CSI 300 stock index has also badly underperformed global peers on broad disappointment with the economic rebound, down about 1 per cent year to date after falling more than a fifth in 2022. That compares with a 13 per cent gain for the S&P 500 this year.
Pressure has also been building on the Chinese currency. The renminbi touched a seven-month low against the dollar this week after falling roughly 5 per cent this year.
In the wake of a flurry of economic data that missed analysts’ expectations in recent weeks, economists have begun trimming their growth forecasts, and expectations are mounting for Beijing to intensify fiscal stimulus in an effort to spur growth.
Experts have also warned that censoring online commentators deepens the persistent difficulty of obtaining reliable data and information on China — a critical challenge for many countries and companies reliant on Chinese consumers and industry that has been exacerbated by a recent crackdown on foreign due diligence groups.
“It is alarming but it has been alarming for some time,” said Victor Shih, professor of Chinese political economy at the University of California, San Diego.
The latest targeting of financial bloggers, Shih added, most likely reflected policymakers’ concern that “a pervasive narrative that the economy is not doing very well” would undermine efforts to shore up the recovery.
“This kind of censorship is more geared towards the Chinese public, to make sure that there isn’t such a negative view on the Chinese economy.”
