The Health Rumours That China's Regulator Has Listed for Removal

China's internet regulator has launched a two-month campaign against health misinformation, and its list of targets reads like a catalogue of the genre: supplements sold as miracle cures, blood-pressure medicine that supposedly makes blood vessels brittle, and the claim that reheating MSG makes it toxic.

The Cyberspace Administration of China named four categories. The first is commerce dressed as science — ordinary food and health products repackaged as “miracle drugs”, folk remedies that cure everything, and pseudo-science that turns body anxiety into a product, such as the widely shared claim that berberine is a weight-loss drug.

The second is fear. Exaggerated side effects, lurid headlines and assertions that blood donation damages the body or that crystallised honey is unsafe — claims that are either unsupported or lifted out of context, and whose function is to alarm.

The third is the debunking voice itself: posts promising to reveal “what doctors won't tell you”, declaring an entire category of food a waste of money, or insisting a routine test is pointless. Claims that extreme can end with readers diagnosing themselves and skipping treatment, which is where the real harm sits.

The fourth is tradition used as a shield — “ancient methods” of wellness and childcare, arguments that Chinese people do not need protein, and concepts such as “quantum empowerment” that dress superstition in technical language.

A parallel set of targets concerns who is speaking. The campaign covers people posing as medical professionals, retirees still trading on a former hospital and title, invented credentials such as “national first-class nutritionist”, and staged photographs in consulting rooms meant to look like clinical practice.

Two months of enforcement will not remove any of this. What the list does show is that the genre has a shape: it borrows the authority of medicine, sells certainty, and treats the body as a market.