By Sophie Yu and Brenda Goh
BEIJING (Reuters) – Chinese businessman James Liang, who has questioned the country’s Covid zero strategy, has been banned from posting on Weibo, accused by the social media platform of legal infringement.
Liang is a co-founder of Trip.com.
Weibo, a platform similar to Twitter, did not specify which rules Liang broke and did not make it clear when the ban took effect or what triggered it. But on Tuesday, netizens noticed changes in Liang’s account, which has 817,000 followers.
The account owned by Liang now displays a statement saying the user is currently blocked for “violating relevant laws and regulations”.
Reuters was unable to contact Liang through Trip.com, which owns travel companies Qunar and Skyscanner, and the company did not comment.
Weibo did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Last week, Liang wrote an article in which he argued that overly cautious epidemic prevention policies could inflict greater pain on the economy and people’s life expectancy than the virus itself. The post, made on the China and Globalization study center’s WeChat account, was later removed.
In April, Liang posted on Weibo an article he had written discussing the low fatality rate of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 and challenging the need for strict epidemic controls in China.
A separate article he published in April in the China Enterprise News newspaper also warned that excessive Covid-19 prevention measures could harm the Chinese economy.
The strategy to fight Covid-19 is not the only problem Liang has targeted. In his latest Weibo post on April 29, the businessman published an analysis of why China has taken so long to review its one-child policy, a topic he has hotly discussed on social media and in press interviews.
While Liang has remained active on Weibo amid an increasingly tight regulatory environment over the past two years, several other once outspoken Chinese business leaders have become more restrained on social media or have stopped posting altogether.
Other high profile Chinese banned by Weibo recently include private equity investor Dan Bin and Wang Sicong, son of Dalian Wanda founder Wang Jianlin.
As with Liang, the specific reasons for these bans were not given, but Dan had questioned the feasibility of the Covid zero policy, and Wang challenged the effectiveness of a government-endorsed traditional Chinese medicine to treat the virus.
(By Sophie Yu and Brenda Goh)
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