China Gags Business Scribe As Economy Wobbles

Beijing has banned prominent Chinese financial journalist Wu Xiaobo from social media for comparing the country's economic problems to the Great Depression in the United States, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

Photo Insert: Wu's Weibo page appeared on Tuesday to have been scrubbed of all content posted since April 2022.

The Weibo account of Wu, an author with more than 4.7 million followers, "is currently in a banned state due to violation of relevant laws and regulations", according to a banner displayed on his page on Tuesday.

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 lackluster data in recent weeks signaling 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.

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.

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