Chinese blogger rails against Communist Party enemies and rattles business, intellectuals with reminders of past

State media has republished toned down versions of Li Guangman’s belligerent posts about China’s tech companies, big business and entertainment stars

While senior officials deny being in favour of ‘robbing the rich to help the poor’, many are concerned about any unguarded push for common prosperity

Reading Time:5 minutes

Under President Xi Jinping, China has grown more serious the goal of common prosperity and has pledged to achieve “substantial progress” by 2035. Photo: Reuters

Published: 2:14pm, 3 Oct 2021Updated: 11:00pm, 4 Oct 2021

When Li Guangman, a little-known blogger in China, declared “a profound revolution” was under way against China’s big businesses, many in the country were reminded of the worst nightmares from the Mao Zedong era.

Li used warlike language against China’s tech companies and misbehaving celebrities, as well as unspecified surrogates for the United States in the country, and then had his voice magnified by a handful of key state media websites, which carried a mildly toned-down version of the article.

“Li Guangman is the Yao Wenyuan of our time,” wrote a user on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter. Yao, a previously little known official based in Shanghai, rose to national fame after an article in 1965 was praised by Mao, who kicked off the Cultural Revolution the next year.

Yao’s article accused Wu Han, then a well-established historian and official, of taking the “capitalist stance”, paving the way for the downfall – and in the case of Wu, death – of numerous intellectuals in the Cultural Revolution.

In 1965, Yao Wenyuan sparked the Cultural Revolution with a diatribe in a Shanghai paper and then became a Politburo member. Photo: UPI

After Li’s piece set off viral discussions, senior officials and state media acted quickly to restate their support for the private sector.

But Li has unnerved so many that as recently as September 15 – three weeks after his social media post – officials in Beijing deemed it necessary to publicly assure the business community there would be no “robbing the rich to help the poor”.