This year, the theme of World Consumer Rights Day on March 15 was “a just transition to sustainable lifestyles.” As it has every year since 1991, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV marked the occasion with a televised “315 Gala” exposing some of the most notable consumer rights scandals from the past year. The 2025 edition highlighted supply chain issues in some consumer products being sold online, including seafood suppliers that use illegal additives to increase the weight of prepackaged frozen shrimp, and factories that sell diapers and sanitary pads made from recycled waste. (Last year, reports of serious quality defects in domestically produced sanitary products prompted a widespread consumer backlash and a scramble to buy Japanese-made and other imported sanitary pads.)
The frequently self-congratulatory “315 Gala” has long been accused of targeting low-hanging fruit, ignoring China’s glaring lack of consumer-product oversight, and naming and shaming only the most egregious offenders. One WeChat article, “Could Our Standards Possibly Fall Any Lower?,” complained that amidst a constant flood of product-safety scandals such as fake hot-pot ingredients, pig ears adulterated with glue, and dangerous fillings used in everything from sanitary pads to down jackets, March 15 Consumer Rights Day seems like nothing more than “a drop in the ocean.” A leaked censorship directive from 2018 reveals how Chinese news outlets, including state media, are encouraged to trumpet the successes of the “315 Gala,” particularly when the targets are foreign companies behaving badly. While a recent opinion piece in the China Daily acknowledged that “consumer rights protection should be a continuous effort, not just reliant on an annual gala that names and shames,” its main argument was that improving consumer rights protection is essential to stimulating consumer spending to shore up a flagging economy. Perhaps not coincidentally, on March 15 Chinese financial regulators also launched a crackdown on “rumors and fake news” about the stock market. According to the Securities Times, regulators plan to “hit early, hit hard, and hit at the heart" of the issue.
There is also some censorship of online discussion and comments critical of the 315 Gala. In one now-deleted comment, Weibo user 渝剑飘尘三代 (Yú Jiàn piāochén sāndài) highlighted the profound disconnect between the many public- and product-safety scandals and the insistence by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs that China remains one of the safest places in the world:
Food is unsafe, cafeterias are unsafe,
edible oil is unsafe, shopkeepers’ property is unsafe,
students’ lives are unsafe, our personal data is unsafe,
the elderly are unsafe, women are unsafe,
even sanitary napkins are unsafe.
—But the Ministry of Foreign Affairs says: “China is globally recognized as one of the safest countries in the world!” [Chinese]
CDT Chinese editors have archived five articles and essays about 2025’s Consumer Rights Day. The first, from WeChat blogger Xiang Dongliang, focuses on how lax supervision facilitates the sale of counterfeit and substandard goods (often classified as “white-label” or “bulk-sale” products) on Chinese e-commerce platforms. “Destroying one such ‘den’ might throw a scare into an industry and bring about a temporary pause,” the author writes, “but if the root cause—e-commerce platforms looking the other way and allowing counterfeit or shoddy “white-label” products to flood their sites—is not eliminated, then next year and the year after that will see yet another tainted industry, yet another dark scandal brought to light.” A lengthy article from WeChat public account “Uncle Lei Writes Stories” mainly discusses quality problems with sanitary pads and other products. The author praises e-commerce site JD.com for paying attention to quality control, but complains that other platforms neglect their responsibilities to consumers and are afflicted by brutal price competition that incentivizes them to keep advertising shoddy products from third-party sellers. A piece by WeChat public account Gen Z Lab also notes the ongoing problem of sanitary pad quality, in addition to a roundup of current issues and news events related to women, including the topic of domestic violence.
An article from the youth-focused WeChat public account “Fourth Ring Road Youth” highlights a viral exposé about the reuse of food scraps at certain franchise locations of the vast fast-food chain Yang Mingyu’s Braised Chicken with Rice. After some restaurant employees told a Beijing News investigative journalist that they collected food scraps at the end of the day, mixed them together, and reused them the following morning, the journalist reminded readers “not to order takeout before 11:00 a.m.” The story horrified netizens and it became a trending topic online.
An article from WeChat public account QUEERTAIK异见 described a consumer-rights-themed March 15 broadcast from Jiangsu Radio and Television and Lizhi News that called on certain language learning apps to ban LGBTQ+ content because it was “incorrect.” Some of the so-called "incorrect" English-language examples mentioned on the broadcast included the word “lesbian” and the sentence “My aunt has a wife.” Incredulous netizens accused the show of “trying to erase the existence of gender minorities” and heaped scorn on the broadcasters:
"Considering all of the TV shows I’ve watched about straight men and women falling in love, how come I haven’t become straight yet?"
“Do they think just reading the word ‘lesbian’ is going to make people gay?”
"Cartoons show Prince Charming kissing Snow White, but it’s not like after watching them, kids run around the next day randomly smooching people!” [Chinese]
