Why China has banned social media accounts of its top financial journalist

China has banned a prominent Chinese financial journalist from social media. The reason: the influential journalist slammed the country’s slow economic position, comparing the situation in the East Asian nation to the 1930s Great Depression. Identified as, Wu Xiaobo, he has more than 4.7 million followers on his Weibo account. According to a banner displayed on his page on Tuesday, the account “is currently in a banned state due to violation of relevant laws and regulations.” Journalist highlight rising unemployment   Content moderators on Weibo — a Twitter-like platform — said on Monday they had blocked three verified users for “spreading smears against the development of the securities market” and “hyping up 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 faltered, with lacklustre data in recent weeks signalling that the rebound is running out of steam. Wu’s Weibo page appeared on Tuesday to have been scrubbed of all content posted since April 2022.

-In #CCP occupied #China you must brush everything under the carpet
-Prominent #Chinese financial journalist Wu Xiaobo compared China economic problems to Great Depression
-His 4.7 Mil Weibo account promptly banned
-No one knows his whereabouts — Reeducation Center or MSS dungeon pic.twitter.com/YmOu7dJYZE

— Insightful Geopolitics (@InsightGL) June 28, 2023

Wu did not immediately respond to AFP’s request for comment. His regular column on the website of the Chinese financial magazine Caixin has long detailed the country’s economic woes, including a declining birthrate and skyrocketing youth unemployment. “The huge army of the unemployed is likely to become a fuse that ignites the powder keg,” he wrote in a May column that compared the situation with the Great Depression of the 1930s. In another recent column, he asked whether monetary easing would be able to “solve current economic problems”. Those columns, however, had not been scrubbed 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 previously urged investors to avoid reading foreign news reports about China, while analysts and economists have been suspended from social media for airing pessimistic views. Unemployment rate in China Data released in March by the National Bureau of Statistics showed China’s economic recovery after the COVID pandemic on pace, but highlighted a weakness in youth unemployment, which is expected to worsen. [caption id=“attachment_12798412” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Graduates in China having a more difficult time finding job as the labour market becomes more competitive. Reuters[/caption] The jobless rate for 16- to 24-year-olds hit 18.1 per cent in the January-to-February period, compared to 16.7 per cent in December. The overall unemployment rate also increased to 5.6 per cent, reports CNN. It increased further in May, hitting 20.8 per cent, with young people having a more difficult time finding job as the labour market becomes more competitive. China’s new premier Li Qiang admitted that the creation of job remains a big challenge. “This year’s college graduates are expected to reach 11.58 million people. From the perspective of employment, there will be certain pressure,” he said. Due to the lack of jobs, fresh Chinese graduates are posting pictures of themselves slumped over a chair, collapsed against a wall and prostrated on the ground wearing graduation gowns as a form of rebellion, as per a report in Wion. The images are a type of silent protest in which students pose as corpses with the message “more dead than alive.” China’s private sector employs 80 per cent of the overall workforce, and it has been devastated by the country’s now-abandoned zero-COVID policy. With input from AFP Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.