Citizen curation and the online communication of folk economics: the China collapse theory in Hong Kong social media

Abstract

Folk economics has become increasingly influential in today’s era, where laypeople can (inter)actively deconstruct official discourse and form their truth in social media. This article examines the formation and popularization of folk economics by investigating the localized China collapse theory known as zhibao in one of the most influential online forums in Hong Kong. By analyzing the popularization of zhibao as citizen curation – the subjective and non-professional collection, assessment, and criticism of information by participants in online discussions for the benefit of the group – this article questions the dichotomy between folk economics and mainstream economics, arguing that laypeople may selectively appropriate conventional economics into their discourse. Furthermore, by investigating the citizen curation of zhibao diachronically, this article suggests that online discussion participants’ attention to the credibility of the news sources may be negatively related to the credibility of the discourse they are curating.

Keywords

citizen curation folk economics Hong Kong online communication post-truth semantic network

Introduction

The financial crisis of 2008 damaged the reputation of pro-integration mainstream economics¹ heavily and ordinary people perceived that it provided little explanation or solution to the crisis (Gangl et al., 2012: 603–614). Connected by social media, ordinary people formulate folk economics in the form of protectionism and anti-globalization populism contrasting pro-integration economics. Folk economics later materialized into policies through the Brexit referendum and the United States’ 2016 presidential election (Worstall, 2016). The then Secretary of State for Justice of the United Kingdom, Michael Gove, best captured anti-mainstream economic sentiments in events where he refused to cite economist’s support for Brexit by claiming that ‘the people of this nation have had enough of experts’ (Mance, 2016). As the Brexit and Trump’s presidency worries academics, especially economists of the rising populism, some scholars attribute the rise of populism and post-truth to folk economics as it is an ‘alternative fact’ to standard economics and supports populist politicians’ lavish promises and xenophobic speeches (e.g. Ivie, 2017; Swedberg, 2018). However, blaming folk economics for the rise of populism is unproductive. Instead, the long tradition of dismissing folk economics as biased (e.g. Caplan, 2006; Leiser and Shemesh, 2018) probably contributes to ordinary people’s distrust toward experts and knowledge as it confirms their perception that experts exclude them from economic decisions.

In an attempt to open further research on folk economics in social media, this article investigates the emergence and popularization of a folk economic discourse, called zhibao (支爆) discourse, in Hong Kong social media. One may question the significance of zhibao discourse compared to Brexit or Trump’s protectionism, however, zhibao discourse is unique for not only demonstrating how folk economics emerged from online communication rather than inherent cognitive bias but also questioned the dichotomy between mainstream economics and folk economics. Exploring zhibao is also significant to understanding China’s global economic expansion as it offers a unique case of how news on China’s economy can shape people’s attitudes toward integration projects. Furthermore, the discourse on zhibao later became one of the central beliefs of Hong Kong localism (Zhou, 2018), a nativist movement in Hong Kong. It was also a crucial discourse guiding Hong Kong’s anti- Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) Movement in 2019 (e.g. Liang, 2019).²

The article investigates all posts containing the term ‘zhibao’ in Hong Kong Golden Forum (HKGolden), an online forum, posted before 30 September 2018. First, text mining is utilized to discover the basic facts and pattern of zhibao discourse, then visualized through a semantic network to reveal its articulation with other ideas. Significant posts revealed by text mining will also be analyzed to demonstrate how zhibao discourse is formulated through citizen curation, defined as the subjective collection, assessment, and criticism of information and information sources by non-professional participants in online discussions for the benefit of the group (Pedersen and Burnett, 2018: 545–562), as the users of HKGolden share, comment, and debate economic news about China to establish, support, defend, or dispute the belief that China’s economy will ultimately collapse.

This article attempts to explore the question – how do ordinary online discussion participants (ODPs) form their folk economics through citizen curation and online political communication? The remainder of the article is structured as follows. The first section reviews existing literature on folk economics and online political communication. The second section introduces zhibao and describes the methodology. The third section illustrates zhibao’s discursive articulation through a semantic network. The fourth section presents a qualitative discourse analysis based on quantitative research, investigating zhibao’s appropriation of mainstream economic discourse.

Literature review

Folk economics and online political communication

Zhibao discourse is folk economics: ‘the economic notions that naïve (untrained) individuals have and the perceptions of such individuals about the economy’ (Rubin, 2003: 157–171).³ Research on folk economics began with descriptive research on ordinary people’s perception of the economy (Forgas et al., 1982: 381–397), then theorized by economists to explain ordinary people’s ‘ignorance’ and hostility toward (neoclassical) economics (Caplan, 2002, 2006; Ford, 2018; Rubin, 2003). They argue that folk economics are the cognitive biases inherited from ancestors who lived in small communities (Boyer and Petersen, 2018; Rubin, 2003), which are xenophobic, pessimistic, concerns distribution and employment over wealth maximization, and efficiency and, hence, favors protectionism over free-trade (Caplan, 2002, 2006; Rubin, 2003). As a result, some economists advocate economic education to enlighten laypeople (Leiser and Shemesh, 2018), while the radicals advocate economic technocracy to substitute democracy to avoid populistic policies (Caplan, 2006).

These knowledges of folk economics depoliticize economics and legitimize economists’ power over others on economic issues, besides its implicit assumption and bias that any economic thought other than neoclassical economics is biased folk economics (Ford, 2018). Non-economists dispute this ‘bias’ framework and redress folk economics as a discursive construction responding to a specific political situation that resonates with ordinary people’s everyday experiences (Swedberg, 2018; Van Bavel and Gaskell, 2004). They also contend that the difference between academic economics and folk economics is not between scientific truth and misconception, but different moral judgments between fairness and utilitarianism (Haferkamp et al., 2009; Sapienza and Zingales, 2013), or different modes of thinking as laypeople reason economy holistically, while economists disarticulate issues under the principle of ceteris paribus (Callon, 1998; Sapienza and Zingales, 2013; Van Bavel and Gaskell, 2004). Ford (2018) challenges the methodology of previous studies on folk economics as they are either theoretical or conducted through surveys or experiments. Ford (2018) contends that such methods will distort informants’ responses since ordinary people always discuss economy in a political context, hence they are susceptible to the researchers’ preferences if they are forced to answer the question without context. Ford thus advocates a corpus-assisted discourse studies to investigate folk economics while maintaining its context, which this research follows. However, while Ford’s approach is insightful, his corpus is based on parliamentary speeches in New Zealand. While most members of the New Zealand parliament are not experts on economics, they can hardly be categorized as folk economists.

While the new research on folk economics persuasively challenges biases, they still suffer from two limitations. First, they still maintain a dichotomy between folk economics and academic economics, even though the dichotomy is no longer between educated and ignorant, but systematic and narrative (Van Bavel and Gaskell, 2004). However, as demonstrated later, this dichotomy is ambiguous. Second, even the most recent studies overlook the techno-communication context of folk economics, even though folk economics’ increasing influence should be attributed to the changing landscape of online communication. ‘[T]he Internet does provide citizens with a platform to (inter)actively deconstruct official versions of the “truth,” to consume alternative accounts and to produce their theories on forums, websites and YouTube’ (Aupers, 2012: 22–34).

Folk economics being an alternative discourse to academic economics raised a critical question on social media that this research must answer – what is the difference between folk economics and other alternative discourses with a bad reputation such as anti-vaccination movement? The rise of alternative discourses including folk economics, coinciding with the rise of populism in an era when experts are being discredited (Silva et al., 2017: 423–443), triggered concern over the ‘post-truth era’, in which the incommensurable tribes of alternative discourse overtake the authority of truth and facts. Scholars’ views on online communication hence shifted from the democratization of journalism to a threat to liberal democracy (Tucker et al., 2018), warning that the combination of media fragmentation, echo chamber (an environment where a person only encounters information reinforce their views), and filter bubbles (intellectual isolation caused by website algorithm filtering information based on personalized search), which render social media incapable of facilitating rational debate across the ideological spectrum polarizes online news users and harms democratic deliberation (Tucker et al., 2018).

However, unlike medicine or climatology attacked by the anti-vaccination movement and climate change denial, economics does not research objects outside the influence of humans; hence, no undebatable ‘truth’ can be settled on (Skidelsky, 2018). Furthermore, following the definition of post-truth by McIntyre (2018) – ‘a form of ideological supremacy, whereby its practitioners are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is good evidence for it or not’ (p. 12), folk economics is not post-truth in that it also relies on reasoning to persuade others even though this reasoning is not based on scientific reasoning but narratives (Van Bavel and Gaskell, 2004). Contrarily, academic economics, in its worst form, blindly forcing market fundamentalism, while trenched under the excuse of Economics 101 when others criticize their predictability, is the post-truth plaguing our world before post-truth becomes a trendy term (Fine, 2019).

Furthermore, attention given to online communication and post-truth also underestimates the agency of ODPs while overestimating the power of the filter bubble or echo chamber. Questioning the hypothesis of the liberal filter bubble, Pedersen and Burnett (2018: 545–562) investigate liberals’ citizen curation on Trump’s presidency. They discovered that ODPs are aware of their subjectiveness, attempt to circumvent the filter bubble and echo chamber, and actively verify news sources from both liberal and conservative media, while keeping a hierarchy of credibility. Generally, mainstream media is more credible than alternative news sources, and alternative liberal news sources, although, supporting the participants’ views, will still called for a fact check. Golovchenko et al. (2018: 975–994) analyze citizen curation of the MH17 incident and evaluate the effectiveness of Russia’s disinformation campaign. While Golovchenko et al. (2018: 975–994) acknowledge that trolls or government manipulation genuinely exists, it is the voluntary engagement of ordinary ODPs that shape the landscape of online debate.

The concept of citizen curation provides this article a framework to emphasize ODPs’ agency when they formulate and circulate folk economics rather than depicting them as trapped within an echo chamber refusing rational debates. Nonetheless, this article attempts to expand the framework of citizen curation in two aspects. First, while citizen curation borrows the term ‘curation’ from museum studies, it does not expressly address what kind of exhibit is being curated. Thus, this article suggests that discourses, such as the MH17 conspiracy theory in Golovchenko et al. (2018: 975–994) and zhibao in this research, are the exhibits to be curated. Through citizen curation, online discussion participants aim to establish a discourse credible enough for presentation, persuasion, and defense against criticism. Second, previous studies on citizen curation concern only a single event. While citizen curation and other online communication generally intensify during an acute event, it continuously evolves to attract and engage with different social agents beyond the event. A diachronic approach is needed to accentuate the adaptability of the discourse and the strategy of curators when the discourse is discredited or dismissed.

China collapse theory, zhibao, and localism

There has been a long tradition of predicting China’s future, with the optimists predicting China’s inevitable dominance and pessimists propagating the China collapse theory (Irvine, 2016). However, because of the spectacular misprediction of Chang’s (2001) The Coming Collapse of China, the China collapse theory became marginalized in comparison to the optimists’ theory until the 2010s.

Since the early 2010s, China’s economy has shown signs of slowing down. Western media and scholars are expressing increasing concerns about China’s debt burden and overinvestment. A series of publications and reports argue that the investment-driven ‘Chinese Model’ is no longer sustainable (e.g. Pettis, 2013). While these publications tend to distance themselves from the notorious China collapse theory, Chinese officials collectively criticize these doubts about China’s future as a revival of the China collapse theory.

Zhibao discourse evolved from this revival of ‘China collapse theory’. Zhibao means ‘Shina (ex/im) plosion’ (支那爆炸/內爆). Emerging from HKGolden, an online forum known for its massive influence on Hong Kong popular culture, zhibao discourse not only predicts the collapse of Chinese economy due to government intervention or debt, but also suggests that zhibao will provide Hong Kong an opportunity to have greater autonomy or even independence (Zhou, 2018). Zhibao discourse gathered popularity in the third quarter of 2014, which is shown in Figure 1, showing the frequency of posts containing the term ‘zhibao’ in HKGolden compared to ‘locust’, another famous localist rhetoric demeaning mainland Chinese (Sautman and Yan, 2015). Mainstream media started using the term zhibao since late 2014 (Apple Daily, 2014). Then Information officer, Andrew Fung (2016), and former Chief Executive, CY Leung (2018) of the Hong Kong government, both discussed zhibao publicly in a dismissive manner. Zhibao was dismissed as a fantasy that misunderstood both the political and the economic reality, even within the publication predicting China’s economic downturn (Li, 2016).

Figure 1.

The frequency of posts containing the terms ‘zhibao’ and ‘locust’ per million posts in HKGolden.

However, the dismissal of zhibao popularizes zhibao from online folk economics to a broader audience that rarely encounters localist discourse. Since its emergence in 2014, zhibao has increasingly been perceived as one of the most significant economic discourses of Hong Kong localism (Zhou, 2018), a nativist movement in Hong Kong. Popularized by Wan Chin, localism portrays a dichotomy between the totalitarian barbaric mainland China and liberal civilized Hong Kong (Cheung, 2015; Chin, 2011). Chin’s localism, especially his criticism on economic integration with mainland China and the populist narration of mainland Chinese robbing Hong Kong’s resources (Ip, 2020: Ch. 4–6), attracts many supporters as Hongkongers began doubting if the economic integration is as beneficial as the government portrays it to be, because of problems such as pregnant tourism, parallel trading, and conflict with mainland tourists since the late 2000s (Chan, 2018).

The Hong Kong government justifies the integration with mainland China by arguing that the booming Chinese economy provides numerous opportunities benefiting Hong Kong’s economy (e.g. The Hong Kong SAR Government, 2016). Zhibao provides a theoretical weapon to invalidate the government’s discourse by questioning China’s economic future, even suggesting an economic disintegration to avoid the spillover effect of zhibao. Furthermore, zhibao presented itself as a solution to Hong Kong’s problems by bringing property prices down and provided opportunities for Hong Kong to regain autonomy since zhibao critically damages the Chinese government. This latter political aspect of zhibao discourse is especially popular within localists after the failure of the 2014 umbrella movement as it promises activists a political opportunity. Unable to change the formidable China through social movements, localists therefore argue Hongkongers’ should lay low to preserve power until the zhibao comes like a judgment day, then Hong Kong will have the chance to strive for autonomy or even independent (Zhou, 2018). This belief in judgment day maintains hope for activists to fight against the dominant Chinese government. Furthermore, localists increasingly consider tactics to accelerate zhibao. This consideration later inspired the strategy of ‘Laam-Chau’ (mutual destruction) during the anti-ELAB movement to threaten zhibao (Liang, 2019) and ‘yellow economic circle’ to boycott China and pro-China business (Chan and Pun, 2020).

Methodology

This research follows Ford’s (2018) call to discard experiments and surveys in favor of a corpus-assisted method on researching folk economics. However, rather than speeches or articles which constitute corpus in the early stage of corpus-assisted research, this research applies text mining techniques on social media to construct a corpus, as social media has become ‘the’ platform for ordinary people to gather and communicate information, and for the first time in history, allows folk economics to leave written record for investigation.

Text mining is a computer-assisted research method focusing on identifying ideas, keywords, patterns, and other attributes from a large quantity of unstructured text, and it usually involves content gathering, natural language processing (NLP), and reassembling and visualizing it for further study (Drieger, 2013: 4–17). One crucial contribution of text mining to discourse analysis is that it provides evidence against the criticism of cherry-picking (Baker and Levon, 2015: 221–236). This article collected all threads posted from 1 October 2006 to 30 September 2018 from the HKGolden forum (n = 261,825,861), then identifies all posts containing the terms zhibao and all posts responding to threads with zhibao in its title. All irrelevant posts⁴ are deselected, creating a database of 72,319 posts between 30 March 2014 and 30 September 2018. Text mining identifies zhibao’s origin and its popularity, represented as word frequencies across different periods in Figure 1. This article also visualizes zhibao discourse through semantic networks with labeled nodes and edges, where a node represents a term and edges represent the linked terms that frequently coexist within the same post. Since discourse can be defined as the formality of statements (Foucault, 1972 [1971]), and articulation is defined as the connection between two elements in a specific socio-historical context (Hall, 1986: 45–60), a semantic network is the visualization of discourse articulation of a particular corpus.

This article also applies discourse analysis to significant threads revealed by text mining to address some limitations of text mining. First, text mining can only show the existence of a relationship between ideas, but not the reason and context of the identified relationship. Second, online communication is increasingly conducted through visual image or video, which is still unidentifiable by text mining. Third, calling public figures by a nickname is common in social media, and it is impossible to clean all nicknames or synonyms. Fourth, code-switching is common in Hong Kong, and NLP technology nowadays is still incapable of analyzing code-switching. All English except abbreviations with capital letters has to be cleaned to keep the data comprehensible. Therefore, a manual study of the threads is needed to ensure no misunderstanding of the data.

Finding of semantic network

Figure 2 is a semantic network with 100 terms based on the full database. The size of nodes represents their degree – the number of connected edges. Terms with a high degree mean they are frequently discussed and articulated with multiple issues. Unsurprisingly, China, Shina, Hong Kong, economy, and zhibao are all nodes with a high degree since these terms constitute the definition of zhibao discourse. The United States is also heavily discussed in zhibao discourses for three reasons. First, zhibao is often discussed as the result of the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, which prompted capital flight from China and devaluation of RMB, revealed by nodes interest rate hike, RMB, devaluation, and foreign capital. Second, ODPs discuss zhibao as a response to news or by citing experts from the United States. Third, zhibao is sometimes discussed within the framework of China–US relations and the struggle for hegemony, especially since the trade war began in 2018, represented by node D. Trump.

Figure 2.

Semantic network based on all post containing the term zhibao before 30 September 2018.

Terms related to localism are colored in orange, notably Wan Chin, local, localist, city-states, and the localist party Civic Passion. Vocabulary relating to Wan Chin’s advocacy for a referendum to rewrite the Basic Law as a way to regain autonomy is also represented by the nodes constitution-making, Basic Law, and referendum. As localism evolved into Hong Kong nationalism, terms like HK independence and pro-independence can also be found in the network. As mentioned earlier, zhibao is also discussed as a promise or opportunity for future movement after the failure of the Umbrella Movement. These discussions are also represented by nodes failure, future, and opportunity.

Economic terms are colored in green. Terms related to western China collapse theory concerning overinvestment are shown in nodes debt and investment. Interestingly, multiple nodes such as currency, RMB, devaluation, exchange rate, currency exchange, and FX reserve reveals the centrality of monetary issues in zhibao discourse. Besides the popular zhibao discourse about the devaluation of the renminbi as mentioned earlier, the centrality of monetary issues suggests the different approaches to the Chinese economy by Hong Kong ODPs and western societies. The Western China collapse theory is usually written by economic experts researching macroeconomic activities; hence, overinvestment and debt are central in their discussion. While investment and debt are also discussed in zhibao discourses, these issues are outside the experience of ordinary people. Instead, the value of the renminbi becomes an intuitive proxy and approachable data about China’s economic situation for ODPs. Therefore, the exchange rate of the renminbi is a central issue of zhibao discourse even though from an academic economic perspective, the devaluation of the renminbi may help the Chinese economy as it boosts exports.

Four networks were created to illustrate the transformation of zhibao in its early stages under two significant events. Figures 3(a) and (b) illustrate the discursive articulation before and during the Umbrella Movement. Figure 3(c) and (d) were created based on posts during and after the burst of China’s stock market bubble, an attempt to indicate zhibao’s adaptation, either being discredited or praised.

Figure 3.

Semantic network based on (a) 1179 posts from before 27 September 2014. (b) 2280 posts between 27 September 2014 and 15 December 2014. (c) 13,474 posts between 16 December 2014 and 12 June 2015. (d) 31,169 posts between 13 June 2015 and 28 February 2016.

A few further observations can be made. First, all four networks contain posts before 28 February 2016, and they did not contain terms articulating traditional localist discourses except the terms local, suggesting that articulation of localism and zhibao strengthens only after Chin adopts zhibao into localism’s economic agenda in his ‘politics of hope’ in 2016 (Chin, 2016: 90–132). Figure 3(a) illustrates the emergence of zhibao, which is dotted with terms hinting China’s economic news, such as CITIC Pacific and COSCO. Figure 3(b) investigates the relation between the Umbrella Movement and zhibao. Given the late introduction of the term ‘umbrella movement’, one cannot conclude that zhibao has little articulation with the Umbrella Movement, even the node umbrella is insignificant. Instead, the node Communist Party, Pooh (Xi), Jiang’s faction, and open fire reveal that ODPs understand the Umbrella Movement as the conflict between Xi Jinping and Zhang Zemin over whether the Hong Kong government should violently suppress the movement. They argue that if China chooses to open fire at the activists, it will create a crisis of confidence, which will result in zhibao. This thought between violent suppression and zhibao later resurfaced during the anti-ELAB movement in 2019, inspiring the strategy of ‘Laam-Chau’.

Figure 3(c) captures the zhibao discourse when the Chinese stock market surged in early-2015. The node bubble suggests that zhibao advocates defended zhibao discourse during the rally by claiming that it is just a bubble. The popularity of zhibao exploded as the Chinese stock market crashed on 13 June 2015, as Figure 1 shows the peak of zhibao mentions in the third-quarter of 2015. Figure 3(d) discovers that zhibao was used in two ‘irrelevant’ contexts. First, the 2015 Tianjin explosion represented in the node Tianjin has been discussed as the ‘physical zhibao’ and an omen of the ultimate zhibao. Second, in a thread discussing figures of low quality represented in nodes Tokusatsu, power ranger, and superman, zhibao is used to indicate explosion and breaking down. While this seemed like mere noise, it is evidence of zhibao becoming a term of ordinary usage in HKGolden’s culture and of acquiring different meanings outside its original denotation.

Nodes related to news such as CNBC, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), and Forbes can also be found in the network, showing the crucial role of news sharing, especially by western media with a reputation in financial news, in the early stage of zhibao discourse. In the 91 threads about zhibao collected before the Umbrella Movement, 54 are news sharing threads. The number of news sharing threads decreased to 29% (78 over 301) during the Umbrella Movement, then further diminished to 21% (random sampling from 1949 threads) during the market rally and 17% (random sampling from 4104 threads) during the stock crisis. The absolute number of news sharing threads increased with the popularization of zhibao discourse, and the decreasing percentage suggests that zhibao increasingly becomes an independent topic.

The next section interprets a few early posts of zhibao for understanding the origins of its discourse tradition and establishing its legitimacy as a credible economic discourse.

The emergence of zhibao discourse

The China collapse theory was not absent in Hong Kong as online commentators had been mocking China’s economic policies (see Shiu, 2014) before the popularization of zhibao. However, these views were mainly contained within a small group of people, especially those who worked in the financial sector. When zhibao emerged in mid-2014, it was only an interesting abbreviation of the China collapse theory. The first thread mentioning zhibao was (Sunday zhibao) WSJ: China has more trouble than housing bubble posted by user zhinakuaijiangbaobao⁵ on 6 June 2014. The original post was an article from Apple Daily, a Hong Kong-based pan-democracy newspaper, referring to an article from WSJ discussing China’s empty malls. WSJ’s Chinese version of the article was also shared in reply. This thread attracted little attention, with only seven responses. No posts mentioned zhibao for 2 months, until zhinakuaijiangbaobao posted another thread, (Zhibao) The CCP began to block the channel of capital outflows, 16 August 2014. The original post was another news article from WallstreetCN, a pro-free market online finance media based in Shanghai. This thread attracted 49 responses, including both pessimists and optimists of the Chinese economy. Some ODPs commented that the term zhibao recalls a ‘secret code’ or ‘very Shina style’. Such catchiness of the term zhibao may have contributed to its acceptance compared to the China collapse theory introduced earlier.

Zhinakuajabaobao became an active advocate of the China collapse theory; other ODPs slowly followed. The first zhibao thread not written by zhinakuaijiangbaobao was posted on 21 August 2014 by Xianggangliuwangzhengfu, sharing news from Bloomberg about China cutting its production targets for shale gas. The first comment mentioning zhibao in a post without zhibao in its title was by Baoluo_huote, in a thread discussing an article written by WSJ on 22 August 2014 on China’s economic difficulties. Zhibao posts in the early stages all contain news items. News sharers usually use the original news title as the thread’s title, besides using a tag such as (zhibao) or (zhibao is coming?). The original post would largely remain unchanged, and the news sharers would only comment on the news in replying posts.

The replying posts constituted a few types of contents. Taking the thread (zhibao) Foreign media: Monetary stimulus become useless, China now faces the risk of Balance Sheet Recession as an example, the most common content is about celebrating bad news about China using emojis. Replies disapproving zhibao are not rare and they are aware of the China collapse theory’s terrible reputation for misprediction. In this thread, one online user replied,

Cursing commie since 2008, ain’t you bored?

Another replied,

No one thought the Soviet Union would implode since it was a giant communist state, then it collapsed overnight.

This mocking of failed predictions about the China collapse theory and its exceptions, citing the experience of the Soviet Union, constantly reemerges in other threads.

After the original post, the original user posted about the falling Baltic Dry Index (BDI) and gold prices, with a meme saying, ‘Ain’t you doomed this time?’ Following which, an ODP said he is unfamiliar with economics and asked the meaning of the Index. One user replied with a brief definition, and the original user clarified that the falling index means weak exports, implying that China’s stimulus is ineffective. Another ODP then checked if the falling BDI is an abnormality or just a seasonal fluctuation. The discussion of the BDI is peculiar in zhibao discourse because its nodes BDI exist in both Figure 3(a) and (c), even though it is a lesser known economic indicator. Although zhibao advocates discuss BDI partly because BDI suffered an unprecedented fall during that time, the discussion of a lesser known economic indicator improved the credibility of zhibao advocates as they knew something others did not. Hence, it may not be a coincidence that it is discussed before the Umbrella Movement (Figure 3(a)) when zhibao discourse was still in its infancy, and during China’s market rally (Figure 3(c)) when zhibao was discredited or considered a joke.

Zhibao also reveals the complexity between academic economics and folk economics. Zhibao is by no means academic economics. However, zhibao advocates demonstrate a broad understanding of economic issues when they discuss economic news as shown in the case of BDI. They can discuss and support zhibao with vulgarized economic analysis and jargon. The lack of standard methodology is compensated for by the citing of news articles, using analogies, personal experiences, and even rumors. Zhibao advocates are also eager to cite economists, such as Ma Guangyuan, Harry Wu, to improve zhibao’s credibility. However, there are few systematic introductions of economic theories within the discussion, but mostly ad hoc quotations, and it is mostly from news interviewing economists for their opinion on particular issues.

Two reasons may explain the relation between folk economics and academic economics in zhibao discourse. Students in Hong Kong learn economics from junior high school; 23.6% appeared for economics in the Hong Kong public exam in 2019. Although economics education in secondary school is not rigorous, it equips Hongkongers with basic economic knowledge, including the logic of profit maximization and the theory of international trade and balance of payments, which helps to understand economic news.

Knowledge has become more accessible in the online era. By using Wikipedia, ODPs can access the meaning of jargon or a concept, such as BDI. Online news and critics introduced academic work, which was then shared by ODPs in online discussions. Some academics became social media celebrities, such as Simon Shen and Ho-fung Hung in Hong Kong, not to mention Wan Chin. Although most zhibao discussions were non-academic, sometimes, academic articles were mentioned. An example is Hung (2008 149–179), whereby Ho-fung Hung also joked about someone asking whether he was the famous zhibao advocate Zhinakuajabaobao, which he denied. The accessibility of professional knowledge has thus been breaking the apparent dichotomy between naïve notions and professional academics proposed by Rubin in 2003. As shown by the notorious Lancet MMR autism fraud involving an article by Andrew Wakefield, an ODP can support his or her argument by citing an academic paper, using its jargon, without any professional training (Davis, 2019: 357–371). If ordinary people’s everyday life experiences constitute folk economics, then we should consider that the rhetoric of experts is also part of this everyday life experiences. However, it is not merely that experts enlighten or educate laypeople, but laypeople selectively appropriate the language of experts to persuade other laypeople and often challenge experts themselves using their own language.

It is Forbes, not The Epoch Time – the hierarchy of credibility

While zhibao advocates curate different news to support their beliefs, as revealed by previous research on citizen curation, they have a clear hierarchy of source credibility, reacting, and curating the news as per the source (Golovchenko et al., 2018; Pedersen and Burnett, 2018).

The shared news can be categorized into two types in terms of sources: Chinese media and Western mainstream media. Chinese news sources are usually treated as less credible. Unlike Western sources, the news sharer will not mention, and at times erase the sources of the shared articles. Sometimes, zhibao news sharers will explicitly differentiate them from these ‘bias’ Chinese sources. This includes The Epoch Times, the mouthpiece of Falun Gong. Since it has a terrible reputation in Hong Kong, news shared to support zhibao from other media would sometimes be criticized as unreliable as The Epoch Times. Mainstream local media, such as Apple Daily, is also doubted by ODPs, as one response mocked a zhibao news sharer by saying, ‘you can apply to be a financial reporter in Apple Daily’. News from acclaimed Western mainstream media outlets in financial news such as Forbes and WSJ has the highest credibility. However, the news sharer is less likely to share the news directly from its source since it is written in English. ODPs either share translated (and paraphrased) news from Chinese media such as Apple Daily or Economic Journal, or sometimes, the Chinese version of the news.

This difference in credibility can be seen in the following conversation in a thread that shared news from Forbes about factory closures in China. A responding post criticizes the news sharer by saying,

Same as the Epoch Times, always zhibao!

The news sharer responds,

Same your mon, fifty cents! You are too stupid to know Forbes. Go to read your People’s Liberation Army Daily!

Sharing views with The Epoch Times is a sufficient ground for ODPs to question the news sharer’s credibility. In response, the news sharer suggests the doubter should read the People’s Liberation Army Daily, which also implies that reading Chinese media, especially the official newspapers, is a sign of low credibility. However, Forbes in this conversation provided credibility not only to the news but also to the news sharer as someone who knows and reads Forbes. Reading western media sources is relatively uncommon in Hong Kong society (Chan et al., 2017), indicating reading from these media sources is a sign of high status and credibility.

This hierarchy of credibility is based not only on the reputation of the media outlet but also on the perceived attitudes toward China. Given the political environment in Hong Kong, Chinese media is usually perceived as either pro-China or anti-China, and ODPs can predict the media’s attitude toward China’s economic future based on it. While Western media also has a political alignment, Hong Kong ODPs are either unaware of it or perceive it as insignificant since the attitudes toward China do not form the core identity of such media sources. Thus, Western media is perceived as neutral toward China and thus more accurate and unbiased in depicting China’s economy. This notion of ‘neutrality equals credibility’ is also applied to other information sources. For example, a well-known Chinese economist Hsien-ping Lang is constantly being dismissed and distanced by the zhibao advocates and others. Although he is well-known in Hong Kong, he is also a vocal critic of China’s economic regulations. Thus, ODPs can anticipate his stance and will dismiss any post supporting zhibao with Lang’s statements as a platitude.

This sense of credibility was especially significant during the first-half of 2015. As the Chinese stock market soared, zhibao was considered as proven wrong and deemed a joke. One thread mocked that zhibao is a ‘religion’. In another thread which share news about Barclays Bank thought that the renminbi was overvalued, a responding posts mocked that zhibao advocates are now bankrupt since they are short-selling the Chinese stocks. Zhibao followers had to cite reliable news from Reuters, The Financial Times, or WSJ to support their claims that the bull market in China is merely a bubble that would only lead to an economic crisis. This was done through a thread titled [Have zhibao happened? You tell me lor!] Reuters: Short-selling on RMB reach five years high posted on 8 March 2015, arguing that while the stock market is soaring, other economic indicators that most people do not know of reveal the truth about the Chinese economy.

Contrarily, post China’s stock market crash in the second-half of 2015, the problem of credibility became less critical as zhibao was ‘proven right’. Besides the conventional economic news sharing, zhibao advocates simply posted a stock market index or any economic data to support zhibao. Furthermore, non-economic news was also being curated to support zhibao sarcastically. The Tianjin explosion on 12 August 2015 is one incident that zhibao advocates curated in ‘support’ of zhibao. The news about the Tianjin explosion, with a video showing the explosion like an Armageddon, caused an uproar across HKGolden. Numerous threads celebrated the ‘real zhibao’ or the ‘physical zhibao’ and eulogized the long-awaited zhibao. Immediately after the 2015 Tianjin explosion, several news stories about China’s explosion and natural disasters, such as subsidence in Dongguan and another explosion in Anshan were also shared as evidence of zhibao.

These far-fetched articulations often stigmatize zhibao as nonsense or fantasy. It is naïve to conclude that ODPs believed that these disasters were related to China’s economic reality. However, one can suggest that concerns about the credibility of the news sources are related to the perceived ‘truthfulness’ of the discourse. When the discourse is challenged, the awareness of the hierarchy of credibility becomes vital since the news curator needs to defend their beliefs by appropriating the credibility of the news sources. When the discourse becomes popular and receives some credibility, news curators will share and discuss news more casually. Thus, this article hypothesizes that news curators’ attention toward the credibility of the news sources may be negatively related to the credibility of the discourse they are curating.

Conclusion

This article investigates the formation of folk economics through news curation by studying the case of zhibao in Hong Kong social media. Two discoveries worth pursuing in future research are as follows: first, in an era where ODPs can find any information online, the boundary between folk economics and academic economics will continuously be challenged. This opened up research questions about other globally influential events such as Brexit or Trump’s protectionism. How ordinary Brexiteers reason the pros and cons of Brexit economically? What is the role of economic theories, whether acquired through education or everyday conversation, in shaping ordinary people’s views on Brexit or Trump’s protectionism? How they reason and defend their stance against criticism from experts? Ordinary people do know some academic economics, and they can support policies generally rejected by academic economics citing academic economics. Further research should examine the role of academic knowledge in ordinary people’s reasoning, notably when ordinary people are increasingly becoming skeptical toward experts.

Second, the importance of the hierarchy of credibility is influenced by the perceived credibility of the discourse the citizen is curating. When the discourse is emerging or is being criticized by the mainstream, news curators are more aware of the hierarchy of credibility and choose credible sources to curate. Contrarily, when the discourses are being accepted or gathering momentum, news curators will pay less attention to credibility, or even allow mocking or the use of satire.

This article mainly focuses on zhibao’s emergence. Zhibao evolved after 2016, facing another challenge when China’s economy stabilized in 2017, then revived when the trade war began, reaching a new height during the anti-ELAB movement and the COVID-19 crisis. Studying zhibao discourse with a broader time horizon could generate more insight, especially zhibao discourse’s role in the two massive social movements in 2014 and 2019. Early analysis shows that zhibao discoursers support Hong Kong localism after the failure of the Umbrella Movement and influence the strategies of the anti-ELAB movement (Liang, 2019). Future studies on Hong Kong social movements over this period cannot ignore the impact of the zhibao discourse, especially zhibao’s role in the framing of perceived political opportunity in post-mobilization Hong Kong. Future research should also consider the reaction of both economic and cultural elites and the mechanism of discrediting the zhibao discourse, thus providing a dynamic picture of the relationship between the hegemonic economic discourse and folk economics.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Yu Po Sang

Notes

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