STOP LOOKING POOR: China’s Solution to Inequality? Cracking Down on Displays of Wealth and Poverty.

Back in 2013, as public anger simmered over the country’s yawning wealth gap, authorities banned the advertisements of luxury products on state radio and television channels. In 2021, social media sites in China removed thousands of videos and accounts that featured large amounts of cash and luxury items. And just last year, a state-owned investment bank asked its employees to stop flying business class.

It’s not just displays of wealth that Beijing wants to make disappear. Content about the lives of people living in poverty has also been subjected to sweeping censorship, the New York Times reported in March, citing the erasure of a viral video of a retiree living on a monthly pension of $14.50 and a singer’s tongue-in-cheek song on dismal job prospects.

“The government has long realized that [economic inequality is] a threat, and they need to do something,” Shan Wei, a senior research fellow of Chinese politics at the National University of Singapore, tells TIME. “But so far, I think what they have successfully done is control the flow of information on inequality issues.”

“Control the flow of information” is about the only thing Communist governments do well, right up until they don’t.