In recent years, China’s economic environment has continued to weaken, with real estate risks coming to a head after more than four years of market decline, mounting pressure on local government finances as land-sale revenues dry up, and widespread business closures and job losses — with AI-driven displacement adding fresh strain to an already weakened labor market. For many residents, these have become part of daily life. Yet in sharp contrast to these lived realities, news coverage of the economic downturn has been steadily contracting in the public sphere, and the full picture of the situation has grown increasingly difficult to present.

In 2025, as restrictions on public expression tightened and controls expanded, economic conditions deteriorated further. The Central Propaganda Department and the Cyberspace Administration of China moved to further limit how news media, privately operated “self-media” accounts on social media platforms like WeChat, and individual internet users could describe the country’s economic troubles. Platform operators, news organizations, and journalists have had to be increasingly cautious in handling economic topics deemed negative — including real estate issues, business conditions, and unemployment.

Because of safety concerns and the professional risks of speaking openly about censorship in China, the journalists interviewed by Tian Jian (田間) — Li Xi, Liu Yang, and Hu Yue — as well as the self-media practitioners identified here as S and K, are referred to in this article by pseudonyms, upon request and at the discretion of Tian Jian’s editors.

Li Xi, a financial journalist at a Beijing media outlet, told Tian Jian that beginning in the first half of last year, his publication introduced new rules governing coverage of “negative” economic conditions. These included a long list of topics — the property market slump, the collapse of local government revenues from land sales, declining household incomes, existential challenges facing businesses, corporate layoffs and unemployment, and the banning of coal-burning for rural household heating. All of these were marked as demanding “caution.” “Our editors have repeatedly told us to be careful with our pitches,” Li said, “and instead to ‘sing the praises of a bright future,’ and not spread bad news.”

“Writing about which stocks are underwater, about rising social security contributions, about farmers not being allowed to burn coal for heat — none of that is acceptable,” Li added. 

Stories on these topics, said Li Xi, have gradually come to be classified as “high-risk story pitches.” Even when they are not explicitly prohibited, they tend to be rejected at the pitch stage, and rarely do they ever find their way into real editorial discussions. “At our meetings, we don’t even bring up these kinds of negative pitches anymore,” he said.

In many rural areas, the impact of the economic downturn has been compounded by other restrictive policy measures that can be keenly felt. In parts of rural Hebei, for example, local residents have told reporters that environmental policies such as the “clean heating” (清潔取暖) push have required households to stop burning coal for heat. The mandated switch to natural gas or electricity has come just as heating costs have risen significantly. Some families have struggled as a result to stay warm through the winter. They have reduced their gas use, and in some cases simply endured the cold. 

In many rural areas, the impact of the economic downturn has been compounded by other restrictive policy measures that can be keenly felt. 

Those interviewed for this article said that the coal-burning practices on which they had long depended were abruptly halted, and this change came with limited subsidies. Costs have been an added strain on rural incomes. 

Such issues are not reported in China’s state-controlled media, and related discussion can only happen privately among villagers, or in a scattered fashion on social media platforms. 

On January 9 this year, the Chinese agricultural and food media outlet Foodthink (食通社) published a commentary on its WeChat public account about the hardships caused by the coal burning bans. But the post was quickly deleted. 

Liu Yang, a veteran economic reporter who has worked at several metropolitan newspapers, told Tian Jian that much economic journalism in China is still weighed against political standards — assessing whether it serves political imperatives. And constraints have tightened notably of late, he said. 

“In the past, newsrooms would still cover stalled construction projects, reporting from the ground on deteriorating business conditions and homeowners asserting their rights,” Liu told Tian Jian. “But over the past two years, and especially in the past year, that kind of pitch has dropped off sharply. Both editors and reporters are restraining themselves.”

“It’s not that no one knows about the problems — everyone knows perfectly well that this kind of story can’t make it through the editorial process,” Liu said. 

At one story meeting, he recalled, he proposed coverage of a second-tier city where a large number of new apartments were sitting unsold and being offered at half price. His editor did not reject the idea outright, but quickly redirected the conversation, asking whether the piece could instead take the angle of “policy support” or “expectations of a market recovery.” 

“At that moment you understand clearly,” he said. “The pitch as you’ve presented the story is already unsuitable.”

Soft Words for a Hard Environment

The constraints are especially pronounced in coverage of China’s real estate sector. Three journalists who have long covered the property beat noted that for some time now reporting has declined substantially on such issues as funding shortfalls among property developers, delayed project handovers, construction stoppages, and homeowners asserting their rights. And story pitches that would once have seemed routine — such as developer debt defaults, idle construction sites, and collective homeowner complaints — have become nearly impossible to shepherd through the approval process.

Even where construction stoppages and delayed handovers are ongoing, such situations are harder to present as standalone news stories, Liu Yang said. Instead, they must be downplayed, or glossed briefly as background. “Every day we receive dozens of messages from homeowners, wage-seekers, and rights advocates, but most of the time we have no choice but to let these story leads go,” he said. “We used to be able to visit construction sites and track down homeowners. Now, a lot of the time, you know from the outset that this approach simply won’t work.”

Moving away from these stories, most Chinese newsrooms now gravitate toward angles emphasizing corporate financing progress, bank credit support, and local government policies to stabilize the property market — topics centering on the “restoration of market confidence” (市場信心修復). During an online gathering with journalists in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu province, Tian Jian spoke with at least three reporters who said that when covering real estate, their stories more readily took shape around developers securing new loans, rolling over debt, or benefiting from local government support policies. The emphasis, they said, has shifted gradually from exposing real-world risks to stressing policy stability and financing arrangements — and to the language of expectation management: “improvement” (改善), “recovery” (回暖), and “boosting confidence” (提振信心).

Hu Yue, a veteran editor at Dahe Daily in Henan province, said that even in coverage of a single company, editorial departments tend to play up positive signals — recovered financing channels, say, or rebounding sales figures — while glossing over or omitting entirely that same company’s debt pressures and stalled construction projects. “Very often, when reporters write real estate news, they can only come at it from angles like government support or an improving environment, things like an active secondhand housing market, or recovering homeowner confidence,” he told Tian Jian. “Content like that doesn’t really attract attention, but it’s relatively safe.”

Xiao Yao, a graduate of the journalism program at Shanghai’s Fudan University who has worked for years in Chinese financial media, told Tian Jian that she initially found many things worth writing about when she started covering the economics beat. In recent years, however, the range of possible stories has narrowed considerably. “The kinds of stories that are accepted now tend to focus on language emphasizing that developers are ‘flush with funds,’ or ‘bank support is increasing,’ or ‘the policy floor is showing results,'” she said. “Even when your on-the-ground reporting shows that sales are struggling, you can’t simply write a piece about a downward trend.”

“Sometimes you don’t even need to be explicitly told. You just know which words you can’t use.”

After a time, she added, such decisions become second nature. “Sometimes you don’t even need to be explicitly told. You just know which words you can’t use — words like ‘slump,’ ‘collapse,’ or ‘freefall.’ Editors will gravitate toward vague, softened language instead.”

Wang Yi, a retired lecturer in the journalism department at Fudan University, told Tian Jian that economic journalism’s loss of voice (失語) in China does not stem from journalists’ lack of ability or a decline in professional standards. Rather, it is the result of an institutional environment shaped over many years. In the current climate, where the space for public expression continues to narrow, economic news tends to be viewed as a sensitive domain with potential social implications, said Wang. How it is presented is inevitably constrained by the imperative of political stability.

“When words like ‘risk,’ ‘downturn,’ and ‘contradiction’ are persistently carved out of the language, journalism naturally drifts toward vagueness and abstraction,” said Wang. “My personal sense is that the 1990s were actually a period of relative openness in journalism.”

Wang Yi said the repeated emphasis on “confidence,” “expectations,” and “stability” in the practice of journalism has fundamentally displaced the basic function of economic reporting — from reflecting real problems to serving macro-narratives and policy objectives. “This doesn’t mean the problems don’t exist,” he said. “It means they have been transformed into a background presence that doesn’t need to be discussed openly. In the long run, this approach undermines the public’s ability to understand through journalism how the economy actually functions.”

The No-Go Space of Land Revenue

Another direct consequence of the decline in China’s property market has been a sustained drop in local government revenue from land sales. But this topic, too, has rarely made it into published coverage. Pitches touching on local fiscal strain, shrinking land transaction volumes, and mounting financing pressures on local governments tend to be flagged as “high risk” from the outset, and rarely survive editorial discussion.

Speaking about recent shifts in official messaging, a retired official surnamed Zhou, formerly of the Propaganda Office of the Guizhou Provincial Communist Party Committee, told Tian Jian that the land-revenue question has always been treated as acutely sensitive at the local level. “A decline in land-sale revenues directly touches on local fiscal conditions, debt, and the functioning of government. Once problems like this are discussed openly, people very quickly start drawing connections,” he said. “The propaganda authorities generally don’t encourage the media to explore the topic in depth. The preference is for stabilizing expectations and stabilizing confidence.”

The official recalled that even in internal discussions in the past, officials were expected to couch such matters in the most technical and ambiguous terms possible, to avoid any reading that local finances faced systemic risk.

He also noted that official language in recent years has leaned increasingly on “code words” (暗語) to soften the tone — and so calm the public mood. “Unemployment, for instance, gets called ‘flexible employment’ (靈活就業). Layoffs become ‘personnel optimization’ (人員優化). Business difficulties are glossed as ‘phase-specific pressures’ (階段性壓力). Fiscal strain is rendered as ‘pressure on the revenue-expenditure balance’ (收支平衡承壓) or ‘structural adjustment’ (結構性調整).” Such formulations, he said, have become standard in internal communications. “The purpose is not to deny the problem, but to avoid triggering panic.”

The same silence pervades coverage at the corporate level. Business closures, layoffs, and operational hardship have become the norm across many industries, yet these tend to be presented in coverage as “isolated cases,” making it difficult to see the broader story.  Stories about clusters of business shutdowns or widening employment pressures rarely receive sustained treatment in the state-run media and their commercial counterparts. To some extent, self-media have tried to step into the gap left by official news outlets, but they face strict constraints.

Xiao Qiao, a self-media operator based in Nanjing, told Tian Jian that he once tried to document a wave of closures among small and medium-sized enterprises in Suzhou and Kunshan, publishing his interviews as short videos. “A lot of small and medium-sized enterprises in Kunshan have shut down. Foreign and Taiwanese capital are pulling out, and a lot of people who’ve lost their jobs can’t find new work,” he said. “I put my interviews online, and within half an hour they had several hundred views. Then they were quickly blocked and taken down.”

This was no isolated case, Xiao Qiao added. “Several of my online friends also went out to film business closures and interview laid-off workers, and their content basically couldn’t get through review.” Nothing like this had happened before, he said — and it left him feeling helpless.

On employment and income, the silence takes the form of a shift in framing. Unemployment, pay cuts, and the struggle to find work are not entirely off-limits — but coverage tends to confine them to individual experience, where they cannot cohere into any larger story about the system itself.

Yu Ping, an editor at a digital media outlet, told Tian Jian that employment topics are more easily packaged as stories of “personal perseverance” (個人奮鬥) or “successful transitions” (轉型成功) than as discussions of deeper changes in the labor market. “When something negative happens, we package it according to the requirements of the authorities,” he said. “You can write about how one person found work again. What you can’t write about is why finding work has gotten harder for everyone.”

On platforms like Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, and WeChat, posts about quiet shopping streets, falling consumer spending, or mounting layoffs are more likely to be throttled or blocked outright, and rarely circulate for long.

S, a self-media operator who has long run a lifestyle-oriented account, told Tian Jian that he had published several videos about vacant storefronts and diminishing foot traffic, only to see his viewership drop sharply. “Later on I learned that as soon as a video is found to contain words like ‘closure’ or ‘shutting down,’ the [online censorship] system suppresses it and traffic [to your account] is kept extremely low,” he said.

K, a user on Xiaohongshu who documented her search for a new job after she was let go from her previous position, said that posts sharing her experience had been subject to noticeably longer review times or clearly limited distribution. “You gradually learn to rephrase things,” she said, “or you just stop writing altogether.”

Sentiment Management

Sun Shu, a Beijing-based scholar who researches digitalization, told Tian Jian that there is no single, clearly defined red line in the censorship of economic-downturn coverage. In practice, however, platforms tend to suppress content that risks producing “emotional clustering” (情緒聚集). “Stories of individual hardship are generally not a problem,” he said, “but when similar content appears in concentrated form, the system tends to read it as a risk.” In platform algorithms, keywords, interaction density, and emotional sentiment jointly determine how visible a piece of content becomes.

“What platforms worry about more is any judgment about the overall trend (趨勢判斷),” Sun said. “Once content is read as describing a general downturn, it can be throttled.” Under this mechanism, Sun said, economic reality is never denied outright. Instead, it is taken apart and scattered, so that sustained, visible public discussion is never allowed to take shape.

In China today, economic questions are no longer topics open for meaningful discussion. Rather, they have become the very ground where institutional risk and the limits of journalistic expression meet. This loss of voice in the press on economic issues does not stem from any scarcity of facts, but from which facts are permitted to enter public view — and that space is still narrowing.

Tian Yu (田雨) is a Chinese-language journalist covering politics and social issues, and an independent researcher who has long followed China’s media environment, public governance, and changes in grassroots livelihoods. 

This article was translated from the original at Tian Jian (田間), a Chinese-language outlet under CMP about journalism and media development and professionalism.