Shannon Brandao
Shannon's excerpt from the article: "📉🗣☀️ The Guardian [excerpt]: #China is cracking down on negative commentary about the financial market and other sectors as the authorities seek to boost public confidence despite challenging economic headwinds.
This month the #Weibo account Weibo Finance, which has more than 1.5 million followers, issued an instruction against posting any comments 'that bad-mouth the #economy'. The post appears to have since been deleted. Bloomberg reported that several other #finance #influencers had been told by Weibo to 'avoid crossing red lines' and to post less about the economy. Weibo did not reply to a request for comment.
China’s ministry of state security published an article on 12 December saying there was a need to 'sing the bright theory of China’s economy'.
In a separate WeChat post, the ministry said: 'Various cliches intended to denigrate China’s economy continue to appear. Their essence is to use false narratives to construct a "discourse trap" and "cognitive trap" of China’s decline, in order to cast doubt on the system and path of socialism with Chinese characteristics.'
Alicia García-Herrero, the chief economist for Asia Pacific at Natixis, an investment bank, said: 'Economic topics used to be widely discussed but there is an increasing number of topics that are becoming problematic.'
Topics that are considered increasingly sensitive in China’s economy include record high youth #unemployment figures (the government stopped publishing this data in August), #deflation, the struggling #property sector and #capital flight.
The restrictions have been building for some time. In June, three finance commentators, one of whom had 4.7 million Weibo followers, were blocked by the platform as a punishment for 'hyping up the unemployment rate, spreading negative information … [and] smearing the development of the securities market'.
Dan Wang, the chief economist at Hang Seng Bank, said 'the number one sensitive issue now' was foreign #investment, because of its links to cross-border capital flows.
'There is a difference between the actual capital flows and the official attitude when it comes to whether they welcome foreign investors or not. Openly, [the government] welcomes foreign investors, but the current situation is not the best for foreigners to stay. There’s a gap between what the government says and what is actually going on in the #market,' Wang said."
#news #business