China's State Media Deletes Accidental Joke About Stock Market Nose-Dive

Chinese state media has taken down a cheery social media greeting that featured a pair of high divers.

A screenshot taken before the deletion was shared to X (formerly Twitter) by a China watcher who mused the image had been construed as a metaphor for the country's yearslong stock market rout, touching a nerve with the authorities.

China's economy is saddled with a range of difficulties including slowing growth, a property market slump, lackluster demand for manufacturing, a high public debt-to-GDP ratio, and persistent deflation. Chinese equities have lost some $6.3 trillion in market value since they peaked three years ago

"As the Chinese stock market nosedived, the flagship state media Xinhua sent a hilariously awkward "good morning China" post on Weibo, China's X-like microblogging platform, yesterday titled "grow towards the sun, embrace beautiful future" with a photo of... a pair of Chinese champion divers diving.. later deleted," wrote Han Yang, a Chinese Australian commentator and one-time Chinese Foreign Ministry employee.

Newsweek reached out to Xinhua with a written request for comment.

Newsweek wasn't able to independently confirm the reason the post was removed. However, the Chinese government's censors are known to target posts that may even be taken to hint at a banned topic.

The content of the next post Xinhua published, about an hour after the one featuring divers, was less likely to offend Chinese Communist Party sensibilities: photos of dragon-themed cultural relics from Beijing's Palace Museum.

Tuesday saw a temporary reprieve for the nation's equities market, with stocks rising to register their largest gains in 14 months upon news of planned intervention by the central government to attempt to stem the bleeding.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping himself was set to hold talks with the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), which also announced it was placing more curbs on short selling to stop speculators from driving share prices even lower.

The financial regulator threatened malicious short sellers caught in the act would "lose their shirts and rot in jail."

Over the weekend, stock market woes drove many Chinese netizens to vent their frustration on the U.S. Embassy in Beijing's Weibo page.

Curiously, the aggrieved shareholders converged on a post about giraffe conservation, which by Wednesday afternoon had received nearly 1 million likes, 181,000 comments, and 20,000 shares.

Some China watchers said the phenomenon took place because the CSRC and related pages had disabled comments―a common state tactic on the country's heavily curated social media.