China’s internet regulator on Monday launched a sweeping two-month crackdown targeting “malicious” social media content, including pessimistic economic commentary and posts promoting “negative outlooks on life,” as concerns mount over widespread youth disillusionment amid the country’s economic struggles.
The Cyberspace Administration of China announced the nationwide campaign will target content deemed to incite “violent or hostile sentiment,” including posts that spread claims like “hard work is useless” or “studying is useless”. The initiative comes as China faces record youth unemployment of 18.9% in August 2025 and persistent economic headwinds.
1 in 5 young adults is unemployed and the official strategy is 🤫
This really feels like their go-to solution in the past decade or so. Silence whatever they think is the problem and then maybe try to fix it later (sometimes by “fixing” the wrong thing). Tbf this seems to the goal of a lot of states now, unfortunately.
This strategy is absolutely unviable in the West.
Instead, the dumbest idiots with a useful narrative are given massive megaphones and drown out everyone else.
Say what you want, but looks like a pick your poison kind of situation to me…
Yeah I feel when shit will go down in China it’ll be huge not only domestically but internationally and we’re not ready for that. Thats the problem with centralized systems even if you ignore the issues with authoritarianism that there’s no hedging and organic oposition for self correction so you get these massive breaks like the cultural revolution and the Chinese learned absolutely nothing it seems.
Also, if any other country upsets it’s citizens you have a couple tens of thousand people riled up, millions max. If China does it, it’s going to be a quarter of humanity.
Maybe they could employ them to come to Lemmy and argue about how great China is? SOLAR PANELS AND…and… dang it.
High-speed rail.