What are the top 2024 news stories for ordinary Chinese?
Zhuhai car attack, sluggish economy and rush to buy ‘clean’ cooking oil top the list.
Read RFA’s reporting of this story in Chinese
Ordinary Chinese are coming up with their own list of top 2024 news stories -- including “social revenge” attacks, night bike rides and the gloomy economy -- that differs sharply with the state-run media’s list that glorifies the Communist Party.
“Their focus is on the ruling party,” retired schoolteacher Jia Lingmin told RFA Mandarin.
“The media should pay more attention to social issues and report more truthfully,” she said. “But we only see major social incidents, including those that hurt people, on social media when bloggers write about them.”
‘Social revenge’ attacks, Zhuhai killings
While Xinhua listed the ruling party’s launching of a “strict discipline education campaign” in its own ranks as the year’s top story, interviewees told RFA Mandarin that the Zhuhai car attack in November that left 35 people dead and dozens injured should have topped the list instead.
Later the same month, several schoolchildren were injured in a car attack at a primary school in Hunan province.
Commentators say China has seen a spate of “social revenge” attacks by angry people on innocent members of the public in recent years, and that the government sees them as a growing threat to its political stability.
The government responded to the spate of attacks by sending local officials and volunteers to intervene in people’s marital troubles and to mediate disputes between neighbors, in a bid to locate anyone with a potential grievance, and by calling on local authorities to mine big data to identify potential future attackers.
Tainted cooking oil fears
In July, Chinese shoppting rushed to buy artisan cooking oils after the government announced a top-level probe into food safety amid reports that tankers previously used to haul industrial chemicals had been repurposed for cooking oil –- without being cleaned first.
The rush to find “clean” cooking oil came after the Food Safety Office of the State Council launched a probe on July 9 in response to a report in the Beijing News, warning that “companies acting illegally and persons responsible will be severely punished in accordance with the law.”
The Beijing News reported in an undercover investigation earlier this week that it was an “open secret” in the transportation industry that tankers that once contained petrochemical products were being used to transport cooking oil without being cleaned first.
Economic doom-times
The flagging economy was also repeatedly cited by interviewees who spoke to RFA Mandarin, who dismissed the official “good news” list from Xinhua as having little to do with their daily lives.
While Xinhua’s Top 10 cited economic “reforms” that actually did little to boost confidence in China’s future, ordinary people told RFA that they were struggling to get by, with jobs hard to come by.
Government censors also clamped down on anyone sounding the alarm, deleting a speech by top economist Gao Shanwen after he warned that lack of opportunities for young people was tanking the economy.
However, the Communist Party eventually announced in December that it would loosen monetary policy and boost government spending.
“Everyone’s income has obviously decreased,” said a legal professional from the southern province of Guangdong who gave only the surname Chen for fear of reprisals.
“When the economy was better, a lot of people would forget about judicial injustice and government abuse of power because they could make money, but now their most important source of comfort is gone.”
Mass night cycle rides
In June, a group of young women went viral after riding bikes at night, a move that was widely reported by official media as a boost to the “night-time economy.”
The craze took off, with thousands of people taking part over the weeks that followed.
While the mass bike rides weren’t an overt form of political protest, they were a way to let off steam for the country’s struggling young people, who saw it as a brief taste of freedom from their restricted lives, observers and commentators said.
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Anti-Japanese attacks, murder of schoolboy
In September, a 10-year-old Japanese boy died of his injuries after being stabbed on his way to school in the southern city of Shenzhen.
The boy, who had a Japanese father and a Chinese mother, was attacked while with his mother near a Japanese school in Shenzhen, an industrial city near the border with Hong Kong that is home to some 3,600 Japanese.
The killing highlighted ongoing anti-Japanese sentiment in China. After the boy died, hundreds of videos receiving millions of likes were uploaded to Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, calling for the “demolition” of Japanese schools in China.
However, an RFA fact-check found that many of the videos also spread misleading or false information about Japanese schools, including overstating their numbers.
More than a million restaurants close
More than a million restaurants, including 30,000 noodle shops, closed their doors during 2024, with diners in China ordering takeout instead, amid skyrocketing numbers of food delivery riders, according to local media reports.
Amid a sagging economy, glitzy shopping malls and eateries have been shutting down across the country.
The report came as Taiwanese dumpling chain Din Tai Fung, which currently has 30 stores in China, including Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, said it would shutter 14 of its stores in northern China, citing the economic downturn.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
