An internet entrepreneur explains why he deleted a 1,000-year-old poem on his blog, wiping US$16 billion off Meituan’s value
- Meituan shares tumbled by as much as 9.8 per cent in Hong Kong, their biggest one-day percentage plunge in two months
- Meituan’s co-founder Wang Xing posted a poem written during the late Tang dynasty about the burning of books by China’s first emperor Qin Shihuang
Wang Xing, the co-founder of China’s dominant food delivery service Meituan, has sparked a social media frenzy and a sell-off of its stock, after posting a millennium-old Chinese poem seen as an unsubtle jab at the government.
The 42-year-old internet entrepreneur, whose company is under investigation for possible breaches of China’s antitrust laws, posted a poem on Sunday that was written during the late Tang dynasty about the burning of books by China’s first emperor Qin Shihuang. The poem is usually interpreted as an anti-establishment clarion call.
“Anything related to the Cultural Revolution or book burning is particularly sensitive [in 2021] because it will soon be the [Communist] Party’s centennial celebration,” said Professor Xu Guoqi, the Kerry Group Professor in Globalisation History at the University of Hong Kong. “Anything which doesn’t openly praise the party can be taken to mean different things. You cannot undermine the glory of the party.”
Wang’s post, which has since been taken off the Fanfou social media platform – his de facto fan club, where he posted three times a day on average for 14 years – raised eyebrows. Meituan shares tumbled by as much as 9.8 per cent in Hong Kong, their biggest one-day percentage plunge in two months, before clawing back some of the losses for a 7.1 per cent decline, wiping out US$16 billion in market value. Meituan’s spokespeople declined to comment.
Wang posted the poem on Sunday by Zhang Jie, written during the late Tang dynasty (618-907 AD), in which the poet used 28 Chinese characters in four verses to harshly criticise Qin Shihuang over the first emperor’s tyrannical acts of burning books for thought control.
“Before ashes [in the book burning pit] turned cold, revolts rose east of the mountain,” the poem read. In another line, the poet wrote that the two major leaders of the revolt who overthrew the Qin dynasty, Liu Bang and Xiang Yu, were not fond of books, belittling the first emperor’s futile efforts of trying to strengthen his rule by punishing intellectuals and suppressing ideas.