China is reportedly scrubbing the internet of negative coverage of its economy

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to World News@lemmy.world – 372 points –
China is reportedly scrubbing the internet of negative coverage of its economy
businessinsider.com
46

Their economy is never in decline, never deciduous, always ever grand.

Well, they did invented the term "negative growth"

The economy has grown back to 2007 levels!

Negative GROWTH means they cancel out and you get nothing.

Which I guess now that I am saying it I realize it might not be them lying or even wrong.

Do you know that China is in decline? Yeah. Oh, God, they practically invented decline.

Winnie doesn’t want people to know their economic system is in no way sustainable?

To be fair, neither is Western capitalism considering the environmental costs

Sure, but China suffers from enormous environmental cost as well (cement is ridiculously terrible for the environment; now think about what drives most of their paper growth), under an inherently unstable hybrid between market capitalism and state economy, coupled with what can only be described as a demographic WMD, an erratic leadership that, through purges after purges after purges, is busy erasing even the pretense that it's operating under technocratic principles - and on top of that, you get these heave-handed attempts at information control. The latter in particular has never ever worked at making people forget that the economy is on a downwards trajectory with absolutely no sign of even slowing down, let alone a solution that doesn't involve launching a major war in Asia in the hopes that rallying around the flag will somehow prevent the whole house of cards the CCP has been busy building over the last couple of decades from crashing down.

Xi inherited many of the issues China is suffering from, but he also inherited a nation that was slowly opening itself and reversed that course almost from day one. Instead of realizing the untapped potential the emerging Chinese civil society had, he only saw it as a threat and clamped down on it through positively Maoist measures. He has also done everything in his power to make the economic situation worse, all in the name of securing his rule and that of his party (in that order). Xi's answer to economic woes and the demographic decline is mass slavery, which I feel the world will finally stop accepting the moment China oversteps its bounds towards the outside. A war against Taiwan would do it, but I feel like even a major escalation in their (at this point) ten dash line imperialism, perhaps against Japan, could be enough to trigger substantial backlash.

In 1971 there was an oil crisis that put an end to the post-war consensus in the US, and the deindustrialization that followed was a shift to a more professional service financial economy. In China Mao had died and the Cultural Revolution was over. Deng opened up the country to capitalism through a Soviet-style manufacturing push and the creation of economic zones. So we have this relationship between the world's largest consumer economy and the world's largest manufacturing economy up to the present day. China's economic growth currently is outpacing other developed countries post-covid, and they represent a greater percentage of worldwide economic growth than the US, they have the single largest share of the world's economic growth.

People in the US who criticize China for polluting is incredibly ironic in this context. US capital interests are more than happy to exploit China's manufacturing sector, and China takes the blame for all the things that brings with it.

China’s economic growth

How much of this is growth comes from construction? How can we know we can trust the numbers out of China?

Begs the question of how you're substantiating any claims if you can't trust any information to base it on. Use a critical US report on China's economy if you want. A granular distribution of GDP by economic sector is the data you're asking about, a legit resource will serve you better than a random internet commenter. You'll find their service economy is where the percentage share of growth has been wherever you look.

That’s true too! But we’re not hiding it at least.

Ehh... Gas companies knew about global warming since the 50s and Congress since the 70s.

We're ignoring it, too.

The time we learned about global warming to now is longer than the time we started using fossil fuels to the time we predicted global warming. And we're pretty close to what they predicted way back then

There's an xkcd on it, I saw it the other day but I can't find it now

Yeah well fuck them. The insistence on outright lying and deceit is a huge reason I detest the CCP.

Bunch of amateurs. Don't they know that the proper approach is to flood the internet with articles of "the economy is doing amazing, you peasants just don't know it"?

If you don't tell the people they're starving, how could they possibly know?

Every day i wake up and take a shower watching a youtube video about how China is falling apart at the seams internally and it really lightens up my mood!

Yep, that will fix the underlying weakness! /s

This and things like banning short sells are bad news on two fronts, in that they both reveal a problem and will be ineffective at solving it.

Xittie the Poo's got a turd in his hunny and he's pissy.

Xittie?

Xi Jinping, chairman of the communist party of china

I'm just confused, it's usually Xinnie (from Winnie). Wondering what the significance of the T is

Think it's a triple portmanteau of "Xi", "Winnie", and "Shitty"

but that one bot poster told me China is getting more powerful and the Yuan will replace the Dollar.

Any day now

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Reports this week from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal detail efforts by Chinese authorities to scrub the internet of negative takes on the state of its economy.

According to the NYT, The Ministry of State Security said in its official WeChat account that citizens should not believe the "false narratives" about the trajectory of China, and instead should believe in President Xi Jinping's vision.

Meanwhile, officials continue to espouse an upbeat outlook for growth this year, even as the economy grapples with a cocktail of bearish headwinds including a troubled real estate sector, crashing stocks, deflation, and youth unemployment.

In one example cited by The WSJ, an article from a Beijing-based outlet that called for more direct state intervention in addressing economic challenges was erased from the website within hours of publishing.

That, too, disappeared shortly after it was published, and on WeChat, a message appeared to those trying to access it on Li's account: "The content can't be viewed due to violation of regulations."

Experts have told Business Insider over recent weeks that the "uber-bearish" narrative on China has become entrenched, and that authorities have slim chances of engineering a rebound in the near term.


The original article contains 340 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 41%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

You are making it too complicated Winnie the Pooh. Just do what we do in the West. Hire a bunch of economists to go on the TeeVee or in dead tree media and tell everyone that all is fine.

Here's how Gamestop can still moon

/s