With China’s economy in trouble – a fifth of young people are jobless – official censors are working overtime to suppress online reporting of bad news. In addition, public skepticism about official data is rising. Yet the ruling Communist Party has another problem. When a mass of Chinese people creates an economic success story on their own, the party tries to take credit, while the truth about such freedom is hard to repress.
A startling event this year in China was the rush of millions of young people to the industrial city of Zibo after the lifting of COVID-19 lockdowns. Social media had spread word of Zibo’s hospitality and outdoor barbecue stalls. Videos on Douyin, the local version of TikTok, showed customers delighting in eating kebabs outdoors. In March alone, 4.8 million people showed up in a city of 4.7 million.
The “barbecue craze” was a “social-media phenomenon unlike anything China has seen before,” declared The Economist in May. Other cities inquired on how to copy Zibo’s success.
The party claimed it had sparked the tourist rush. Yet many online commentators noted the spontaneous nature of people traveling to Zibo. One respected blogger who writes about the economy, Wu Xiaobo, said the mass pilgrimage was “fulfilling … common people’s imagination of a free market: high-quality and affordable commodities, a hearty consumption experience, a market environment that is childlike and honest, and a humble and friendly ‘small government.”
Zibo’s officials got out of the way of the craze more than they guided it. People were “participating in a small experiment of democratization,” wrote Mr. Wu. “This is an extremely humble goal, but it is so precious in today’s China.”
He added, “You can never underestimate the silence and ‘voting with your feet’ of the people. Today, when people’s wisdom has been developed, no slogan or declaration is worth a free barbecue. People don’t need sentimental ‘fatherly love’, but only long for equality. People’s recognition of power has always been based on the common value of ‘people do not deceive themselves’.”
For that commentary and other “harmful information” about China’s economy, Mr. Wu’s writings were banned June 26 by the Weibo social media platform. Given his prominence – he had some 5 million followers – the ban only adds to concerns that Beijing has returned to an old habit of distorting economic data as well as heavily controlling the media narrative about the economy.
Government statisticians are highly respected in China, but “it’s not their job to … just straight-up report data,” says Anne Stevenson-Yang, managing principal of J Capital Research. “Their job is to target a particular number and see whether the data can be twisted a little bit to meet that number.”
The Zibo barbecue craze, now largely over in the heat of summer, may linger in the memory of Chinese people. Their wisdom, honesty, and longing for equality, as Mr. Wu noted, were on display in the city. In fact, he concluded, the phenomenon “is the whole reality of China in 2023.”