BEIJING — A Chinese blogger has been handed a 20-month prison sentence after being convicted of making up false claims about the safety of Xiaomi’s SU7 electric sedan, according to state media reports released Friday.
Chinese authorities have been intensifying efforts over the past year to crack down on false advertising, online misinformation, and other questionable practices within the country’s highly competitive automotive sector. Officials have expressed concern that misleading content could warp how consumers perceive vehicles and distort fair competition. Bloggers and online platforms accused of spreading false information about automakers have increasingly found themselves in legal trouble.
The blogger, identified by the surname Gao, was found guilty by the Haidian District People’s Court of damaging the reputation of goods by inventing false information and deliberately harming the image of automaker Xiaomi, the Beijing Daily reported. In addition to his prison term, Gao was ordered to pay a 100,000 yuan fine, which amounts to approximately $14,800.
The incident at the center of the case dates to August 2024, when Gao and members of his team published a crash-test video that appeared to show the doors of Xiaomi’s popular SU7 failing to open following a collision. The video also seemed to indicate that the vehicle’s emergency call feature did not activate and that its central control screen remained dark, according to Chinese media accounts.
The clip was posted to Gao’s video-sharing account, which had approximately one million followers, and quickly spread across the internet, racking up around three million views.
Investigators determined that Gao and his associates had secretly tampered with the vehicle’s auxiliary battery before filming and had incorporated footage of a battery that had been damaged by a forklift in order to deceive viewers, the Beijing Daily reported.
Back in January 2025, Xiaomi publicly stated that “a blogger and his accomplices who previously maliciously smeared Xiaomi Auto have been arrested according to law.”
Attempts to reach the Haidian District court and the blogger for comment were unsuccessful.
