People's Daily Enters the Luo Yonghao Gelato Row, With a Warning on 'Traffic Power'
A People's Daily commentary says criticism of products is a right, but that a mega-influencer's one-word verdict — like Luo Yonghao's 'tastes bad' review of a gelato chain — can become a trial by public opinion. The chain, unlike some before it, chose not to answer.
The state-run People's Daily has waded into a fight over ice cream. In a commentary published Thursday under the headline "Criticism is a right — beware of it becoming 'traffic power'" (批评是一种权利，谨防成为“流量权力”), the paper's opinion desk took up the week's most improbable media story: Luo Yonghao, one of China's best-known internet personalities, tried a gelato from the chain Yerenxiansheng — "Mr. Wildman" — and posted a one-word review: "难吃" (tastes bad).
Luo is not an ordinary food blogger. He founded the smartphone maker Smartisan, and after it failed rebuilt himself as a livestream salesman with tens of millions of followers — a voice that, in China's influencer economy, can move or sink a product overnight. His post ranking the gelato as "far worse than" a competitor and signing off "please never provoke me" (请千万不要惹我) did not sink the brand. Instead, its comment section filled with a single line of science fiction: "不要回答" — "Do not answer." In Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem, that is the message from a pacifist alien warning humanity that any reply reveals your location to those who would destroy you. Chinese readers got the joke immediately: engaging a reviewer with Luo's megaphone is how small brands die.
The People's Daily's argument was that the joke has a serious core. Anyone may dislike a product, the commentary said, but when a single subjective verdict rides a following of tens of millions, it stops being consumer feedback and becomes something closer to "a trial by public opinion" (舆论审判). It pointed to the cyberspace administration's standing guidance that large accounts carry corresponding responsibility, and closed with a line that read as both warning and principle: traffic is a double-edged sword that can discipline the market, but should not be "a hammer that easily crushes brands."
The chain itself gave the official media little to adjudicate. Yerenxiansheng did not fight back: it said it was listening and would do better, and announced an ice-cream "harvest festival" — converting a controversy into a marketing calendar. On Weibo, that restraint was read against the most famous precedent. One widely shared post recalled the restaurant chain Xibei's decision to take Luo head-on — a fight that, by the post's telling, cost the company hundreds of millions of yuan and more than a hundred stores before it backed down — and called this week's quiet deflection "one of the few clear-headed samples." Others were less diplomatic about the reviewer himself: one user noted that Luo was a free taster who never paid, "strictly speaking not even a consumer."
The full text of the commentary, carried by China Newsweek, drew more than 20,000 likes and reposts — evidence, if any were needed, of how closely this audience follows the question the paper posed: where one person's right to criticize ends and the power of his traffic begins. The gelato chain's silence was already a story here last week; the harvest festival opens this weekend, and Luo's account has not, so far, posted a follow-up review.