Consumers occupy a peculiar role in China’s tech landscape. They are valued customers of the gigantic platforms such as Tencent, ByteDance and Alibaba, whose strategists try to anticipate their every need. But they tend to lack a collective voice, meaning it is hard to fight privacy violations or manipulative selling strategies.

Consumers are also citizens: once grievances rise to a certain level, government regulators start to listen, to fend off any social disturbance. But this is a politically tinged process. Regulators want to push public opinion in the direction of their own agendas, using state propaganda. China’s consumer associations, which sometimes write damning reports about companies, are government-affiliated and often run by retired officials.

Last week’s Consumer Day show on state television — held annually on World Consumer Rights Day — is an important marker of where public opinion and political sentiment line up. This year, half the show was an investigative report into the use of facial recognition cameras by high-street shops, which were capturing the data without consent.