To maintain a clean internet environment and a positive community of "sincere sharing and friendly interaction," China's lifestyle-oriented platform Xiaohongshu, or Little Red Book vowed to crack down on the phenomenon of wealth flaunting online.

Account holders caught sharing banknotes and bank accounts flaunting wealth will be punished according to the seriousness of the case or removed from the platform.

The Little Red Book official account issued the announcement on Monday and it sparked heated discussion among Chinese netizens.

"Flaunting wealth is not a problem but creating fake personas to entice people to buy things they don't need is what needs to be cracked down on," one netizen commented on Weibo, Chinese Twitter-like social media platform.

"Flaunting wealth conveys incorrect values, and if this kind of thinking prevails, it is very unhealthy and will make people lose the ability to think independently," another user said.

To address the netizens' concerns, Little Red Book said that what it refers to when talking about "flaunting wealth": fake "entrepreneurial" personas, copycats of marketing strategies and promoting false or distorted values by using of misleading, extravagant pictures of luxury products to catch people's eyes and to win traffic.

What's more, content creators which will show a deliberate display of wealth such as showing off luxury houses, luxury cars and luxury goods without also providing useful information will also be punished, as they are deemed to be divorced from the essence of sincere sharing.

Users who promote the immoral values of extravagance and waste will also be targeted. For example, activities that aim at increasing ordinary people's consumption level, such as launching a challenge to spend 1 million yuan a day, are considered to be promoting the concept of extravagant consumerism. This kind of activity seriously violates Chinese social values and provides misguided content to the public.

Little Red Book vowed to continue the crackdown on wealth flaunting, supervising the situation on a regular basis and reporting findings to the public.

Global Times