The non-provoked invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces caused wide spread destruction and inhuman sufferings due to the latter's indiscriminate shelling of civilian residential buildings. Major countries in the civilized world, including Russian civilians in close to 60 cities, have been protesting against the Russian invasion directed by Putin. Unprecedented economic sanctions have been imposed on Russia causing its economy to teeter on the brink of collapse.



However, the strange thing is that on almost all established Chinese media, official publications or even privately run media in China one can hardly see any such reports or images, as if there were no such war going on in Ukraine. 

During the Winter Olympics in February, the Chinese Communist Party leaders were busy hosting dinners to welcome foreign officials. Tens of millions of Chinese, howeveer, were mesmerized to the suffering of a woman found to be chained in a cold shed in a rural village near Xuzhou, Zhejiang province. Xuzhou has had a record of having tens of thousands abducted women who were sold as slaves or became wives of rural men who could not find a wife. The chained woman had given births to 8 children after she was 'picked up and taken in' by a poor man named Dong Zhi Min in the village. She had strong resemblance of a girl who was reported missing in Sichuan Province 20+ years ago. The girl's father had served as an officer in the Chinese armed police stationed in Xin Jiang. He passed away from illness after years of searching for his only daughter without success. Once the CCP leaders got around to pay attention to the chained woman in Xuzhou, nearly all reports of her sufferings started disappearing from Chinese media. 


The Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai wrote in a blog her own experience of sexual harassment by a former top Chinese government official Zhang Gao Li. She described how this government official took the initiative to approach her, how his wife also participated in Zhang Gao Li's affair by guarding at the door. Peng Shuai did not touch anything political, or anything that could possibly be considered as 'state secret'. Yet such a blog of first hand personal experience was taken down or censored by censors without any explanation. 


There is a pattern of media coverage under the CCP-control - No fact-based reporting, no discussion or debate of any event is allowed unless it is approved by the party. However, if only party-approved propaganda is allowed to appear on such a media, or social media, does that media entity still provide information needed by the market? If that media entity does not allow genuine, fact-based discussion, then how is the commercial sponsorship viewed by the market?   

To answer the question if there is a cost for a media entity to hide facts and silence people's views, take a look at the stock price of a Chinese social media company. It reveals a hint.