A prominent Chinese financial journalist who has compared the country’s economic woes 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 suspended state for violating relevant laws and regulations,” said a banner posted on Tuesday was displayed on his page.
Content moderators on Weibo — a Twitter-like platform — said Monday they banned three verified users for “spreading slander against the development of the securities market” and “inflating the unemployment rate.”
Weibo didn’t provide the full usernames of the suspended accounts, but said one of them had a three-letter name that began with “Wu” and ended with “Bo.”
China’s economic recovery from the coronavirus crisis has stalled, and weak data over the past few weeks suggests the recovery is running out of steam.
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Wu’s Weibo page appeared to have been deleted Tuesday of all content published since April 2022.
Wu did not immediately respond to AFP’s request for comment.
In his regular column on the website of the Chinese financial magazine Caixin, he has long detailed the country’s economic problems, including a declining birth rate and skyrocketing youth unemployment.
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“The vast army of unemployed is likely to become a fuse that ignites the powder keg,” he wrote in a May column, comparing the situation to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
In another recent column, he questioned whether monetary easing could “solve current economic problems”.
However, those columns had not been deleted from the internet as of Tuesday.
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China’s domestic media is under state control, and widespread social media censorship is often used to suppress negative stories or critical reporting.
Regulators have previously urged investors to avoid reading foreign news reports on China, while analysts and economists have been banned from social media for expressing pessimistic views.
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