“One of the problems is there’s a lot of doubt about official Chinese data,” Mr. Williams said. “And when they come out with these directives, it just raises more questions.”
In the past year, domestic news media have had to write their stories on the economy with a gentler tone, said a journalist covering finance for a Chinese business newspaper, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Censors have also erased online commentary that contained the phrases “consumption downgrade,” taxes, debt and unemployment, according to the Journalism and Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong, which monitors censorship on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media service.
One post that was removed by censors said: “The bad news in the market is exploding, pessimistic viewpoints are spreading, many retail investors are in despair.”
Another read: “Will the emergence of robots free up labor or cause unemployment and poverty?”
The scrutiny over economic news adds to a broader pattern of the tightening of control over media since President Xi Jinping came into power in 2012. Particularly online, the Chinese government has centralized and beefed up regulatory agencies that monitor content. Recently, the agencies have come down harder on entertainment news and celebrity gossip, in addition to political and social issues.
On Wednesday, Phoenix News Media, a Hong Kong-based outlet with big operations in mainland China, said the Chinese authorities had instructed it to “rectify” its news portal, ifeng.com. The Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s main internet regulator, said that Phoenix had “disseminated illegal and harmful information, distorted news headlines and shared news information in violation of rules.”
Two weeks earlier, NetEase, an online news portal, said it had to suspend updating its financial platform “because of serious problems.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/business/china-censor-economic-news.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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