Graft watchdog decries ‘mukbang’ craze that leads to food wastage.
SHANGHAI: China’s corruption watchdog has called on video-sharing platforms to take action against “mukbang” shows, where people livestream themselves eating or drinking excessively, saying such content encourages food waste.
Mukbang videos originated in South Korea and are increasingly popular in China, but they have faced sharp criticism from state media and regulatory crackdowns, especially since President Xi Jinping launched a campaign to curb food wastage last year.
The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) said video-hosting platforms should strengthen their supervision and remove inappropriate broadcasts and block the accounts of offenders.
Punishments for people uploading such content should be toughened, the commission said, noting that binge drinking videos have grown popular following a clampdown on heavy eating streams.
“Behaviours such as heavy drinking not only damages the health of presenters and causes food waste but also promotes an ugly mentality and harms the healthy ecology of the industry,” it said.
According to CCDI, some people uploading “mukbang” videos were earning as much as US$458 (RM1,800) in fan pledges.
China cracked down on “inappropriate” content on the video-sharing website Kuaishou in 2018, suspending the account of one user known as Hebei Pangzai, who regularly shared videos of himself drinking copious amounts of beer to his 400,000 followers. He now shares videos on Twitter.