Outspoken market analyst’s Chinese social media accounts suspended

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – The Chinese language social media accounts of an outspoken Hong Kong-based market strategist have been suspended after a sequence of downbeat commentaries and a hunch in mainland equities to two-year lows on COVID-19 lockdowns and world political tensions.

All content material on the WeChat account of Hong Hao, who’s head of analysis at Bocom Worldwide Holdings, has been blocked since late Saturday. His account has additionally been suspended, WeChat stated, citing unspecified violations of its guidelines.

Hong’s account on China’s Twitter-like microblog Weibo has additionally vanished since Saturday.

Representatives of WeChat and Weibo didn’t reply imediately to emailed requests for touch upon Sunday.

Unfavourable feedback by market analysts and commentators in China are sometimes censored and have come below elevated scrutiny because the nation’s economic system and monetary markets encounter stiff headwinds in a 12 months by which Xi Jinping is broadly anticipated to safe a 3rd time period as president.

Hong didn’t reply to a Reuters textual content message searching for touch upon the suspensions and a Bocom Worldwide consultant didn’t reply instantly to an emailed request for remark.

China’s inventory market is among the many world’s worst performers this 12 months, with the blue-chip CSI300 Index tumbling to two-year lows and the Shanghai Composite Index dropping under the three,000 mark final week.

Hong had predicted in March that the Shanghai Composite Index would possibly commerce under 3,000 factors in a worst-case state of affairs.

The index dropped under that stage on April 25, when Beijing once more started mass testing residents for COVID-19, although the index rebounded to three,047 factors on Friday after China vowed to stabilise the economic system and monetary markets.

Hong had additionally attributed a rout in U.S.-listed Chinese language corporations to China’s crackdown on know-how corporations somewhat than U.S. audit guidelines, warning of potential capital flight owing to plunging confidence in Chinese language shares.

“Shanghai: zero motion, zero GDP,” he wrote on Twitter on March 31 simply because the monetary and industrial hub entered a citywide coronavirus lockdown.

(Reporting by Jason Xue and Ryan Woo; Enhancing by David Goodman)