Chinese Journalist Banned From Social Media Despite 4.7 Million Followers

A famous Chinese financial journalist has been barred from using social media after comparing the country’s economic problems to the Great Depression.

According to a banner shown on his Weibo profile, Wu Xiaobo, an influential business journalist and author with over 4.7 million followers, “is currently in a banned state due to violation of relevant laws and regulations”.

Weibo, a site similar to Twitter, announced on Monday that it has blocked three verified users for spreading smears against the development of the securities market and hyping up the unemployment rate.

Weibo did not reveal the full identities of the blocked accounts, but did reveal that one of them had a three-character name beginning with ‘Wu’ and ending with ‘Bo’.

China’s post-Covid economic recovery has stalled, with recent weak statistics indicating that the recovery is losing speed.

Wu’s Weibo page looked to have been purged of any content posted since April 2022.

On the Caixin website, his regular column has long chronicled the country’s economic issues, including a declining birthrate and soaring youth unemployment.

“The huge army of the unemployed is likely to become a fuse that ignites the powder keg”, he wrote in a May editorial, drawing parallels between the current situation and the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In a recent column, he questioned if monetary easing would be able to solve current economic problems.

However, as of Tuesday, those columns had not been removed from the internet.

China’s domestic media is state-controlled and pervasive social media censorship is frequently employed to prevent unfavorable or critical coverage.

Previously, regulators advised investors to avoid reading foreign news reports about China, while analysts and economists were barred from using social media for expressing dismal opinions.

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