China's middle class following social media rather than state news for financial advice
A new social media phone app called a "Guide on Safe Passage Through the Economic Crisis" has become a hugely popular advice forum for the young middle class.  As we noted last week, faith in China's leadership could be waning within the middle classes, who are now also looking to WeChat or social media apps for news and advice on the economy, rather than the state news media.  Yesterday, Chinese police arrested hundreds of people accused of "spreading fake information" over China's markets on the internet, including WeChat.  
“In the absence of information about the stock market on official media, Chinese investors are relying on social media, primarily the two ‘We’s — Weibo and WeChat — to get news about the economy,” said Xiao Qiang, founder of China Digital Times, which tracks China’s media censorship.

He noted that WeChat was particularly popular because it was less “polluted” by posts from government-supported Internet users and because people could easily share news articles on the economy from Western news publications, especially stories already translated into Chinese.

The author of the widely circulated financial advice column on WeChat, Lin Mo, once worked for a state-run business magazine, then started her own online writing about the economy. She said in an interview that she had published her latest list of suggestions after getting hundreds of messages from “very terrified” readers responding to one of her earlier essays on what she called an “economic crisis.”

“Many readers were asking me things like, ‘What should we do?’ and, ‘What if China becomes Japan in the ‘80s?’” she said. “They are in their early 30s — the age to buy apartments or make investments or start their own businesses. So they have big financial decisions to make, and in the current economy, they worry about losing those investments in the slowdown.”

“Many of them are at a place in their careers where they want to leverage their current positions for higher-paying positions, and they worry about getting laid off by the new company in the economic winter,” she added. “One reader told me that he left a state-owned travel agency to join a booming Internet-based travel service because he felt he had to ‘embrace the Internet’ as a young professional. Now he regrets that decision bitterly because the new company is having layoffs, and he might be laid off first.”