The Facade of Evaluation: How the high-rise is built, and how it collapses?

The review industry will never die. Information asymmetry will always exist, consumers will always face decision-making costs, and the demand for "someone to check things on my behalf" will never disappear. But the reputation built through two decades of unregulated, wild growth has reached a point where it has to be torn down and rebuilt.

Let me start with two recent incidents.

The first one was when a certain agency tested a certain brand of diapers and claimed they "exceeded the formaldehyde limit". Mothers threw their stockpiled diapers into the trash overnight. The next day, the brand released test reports to prove its innocence. Later, people found that the testing method of this review agency itself was flawed: it used a method designed to test indoor air to test a non-woven fabric soaked in urine. How could the resulting figures be used as a ruling?

The other incident involved Zunjie. A brake test dragged in car reviewers, automakers, fans, and trolls all at once. The manufacturer claimed the test conditions were untrue, the car reviewer insisted the data did not lie, and the onlookers were stunned: it turned out that the "professional test" we had trusted for three years might have been flawed from the very first step.

Laymen watch for the spectacle, while veterans see the underlying logic. I have been working in public relations for almost 20 years, and I have handled at least eight review-related crises, if not ten. Today, I will sort out the 20-year history of the review industry, explaining how its reputation was built, and how it was gradually dismantled brick by brick.

01 The Wild Early Era: Reviews Emerged From Physical Electronics Malls

Many young people do not know that Chinese review media were not media at all in the beginning — they were shopping guides.

Around the year 2000, Zhongguancun was the Jerusalem of China's IT industry. You would be pulled into a store counter by a tout at the entrance of Hailong Building, and a laptop would be priced at 12,000 yuan. You would be confused, and the store owner would be even more confused — he had no idea if the machine was good or not, he only knew how much he paid for it from the distributor.

Information asymmetry meant profit. Whoever filled this information gap first could make easy money. That was how sites like PCpop, IT168, PConline, and ZOL came into being. When Li Xiang ran PCpop back then, he was still a high school student. His genius was that he realized telling people "which computer is worth buying" before they buy it had ten times more influence than selling computers directly. The business model for reviews in that era was crude and straightforward: manufacturers sent products for testing, editors wrote articles with soft biased guidance, readers went to physical malls to place orders after reading, and the websites charged "service fees" from manufacturers.

This was the original sin of China's review industry, and the root cause of all its future crises: it was born with sales tasks written into its DNA. In foreign countries, Consumer Reports adopts a subscription model where readers pay, so it dares to publish scathing reviews that tear Toyota's products apart. In China, reviews are funded by manufacturers — how do you expect editors to write objectively?

But it is unfair to say all reviews from that era were corrupt. At the very least, they solved a real problem: in an era full of unscrupulous merchants, someone was willing to use a seemingly objective process — benchmarking, teardowns, side-by-side comparisons — to tell consumers what a product was actually like, which was a great merit for consumers. There was a popular saying in Zhongguancun back then: "If you buy a computer after reading reviews, you get scammed out of at most half your money; if you buy a computer without reading reviews, you get scammed so badly you are left with nothing."

02 The Mobile Internet Era: People Like Wang Ziran Turned Reviews Into a Content Business

After 2012, the smartphone war pushed the review industry into its second stage.

Wang Ziran of ZEALER is a figure I have to write about, not because he was particularly successful, but because he fully staged the first public humiliation of a review media outlet. In 2014, his live-streamed confrontation with Luo Yonghao was watched by the entire internet. Luo's core accusation was only one sentence: you take money from phone manufacturers while pretending to be an independent third party. Wang's responses were defensive the entire time. After that debate, the phrase "objective, independent third party" became a running joke across the internet.

But ironically, Wang Ziran lost the debate, but won over the era. After that, people realized that video-based, personality-driven reviews could attract massive traffic. After 2016, the digital content section on Bilibili rose to prominence. Creators like He Xiaotong, TESTV, and Geekwan turned reviews from "text-and-image shopping guides" into "content creation". The logic of reviews changed: previously, reviews helped consumers make decisions, now reviews help UP creators generate traffic. And at the end of the traffic path, there is still monetization — sponsored content.

The contradiction of "acting as both referee and player" was not alleviated in the era of UP creators, but fully exposed. A digital content UP creator might take a sponsorship from Manufacturer A in the first half of the year and praise its fast charging technology, then release a supposedly fair review of Manufacturer A's competitor in the second half of the year. Do you think his followers will trust him? The 2021 debate sparked by He Xiaotong's video over "whether 5G reviews have any real value" was ostensibly a technical dispute, but essentially a dispute over credibility: when review content and commercial content are produced by the same group of people, why should the audience believe that your measurement scale has not been tampered with?

The digital content circle evolved an unspoken rule to deal with this problem: sponsored content must be marked as "cooperation", and reviews are claimed to be "independent", with efforts made to "separate" the people who take sponsorships from the people who produce reviews. Everyone in the industry knows how fragile this separation is: in the same studio, one hand takes sponsorships and the other hand produces reviews, and you tell me this is a firewall? That is nothing but a lie. But the audience was willing to barely buy it, because digital products have a feature: users can tell whether they are good or bad after using them for three days, and the backlash from a botched review comes quickly, so UP creators dare not go too far.

03 Car Reviews: Traffic Beasts Enter the Arena, Everything Changes

The real qualitative change took place in the automotive sector.

All the unspoken rules of the digital review circle completely failed in the car circle, for three reasons.

First, the professional threshold for testing rose sharply. To test a phone, all you need is a benchmarking app and a camera to get started. To test a car, elk tests, crash tests, and range tests all require venues, equipment, and established methodologies. The vast majority of media outlets do not have these resources, so they invented "folk tests": they test fuel consumption of production cars on highways, test range in minus 20-degree Celsius weather in northern China, and test "brake failure incidents" on non-standard road sections. Their methods are inconsistent, sample size is only 1, and no variables are controlled, but their videos are shot to be thrilling and their conclusions are stated with absolute certainty. The recent Zunjie controversy is essentially the total outbreak of this long-standing problem: when the testing methodology is not public and cannot be reproduced, are the problems you find in the product, or in your test itself?

Second, the automotive industry's interest chain is far too heavy. Behind a single car, there are automakers, 4S dealerships, suppliers, local governments, and hundreds of thousands of jobs. If you say the wrong thing in a digital product review, the manufacturer will send you a lawyer's letter. If you say the wrong thing in a car review, the manufacturer's stock price can drop by tens of billions of yuan, and their legal team will chase you for three years. The 2021 million-yuan lawsuit filed by a carmaker against a self-media reviewer clearly demonstrated this deterrent effect. Great rewards make brave men, but under great pressure, the truth becomes a luxury.

Third, and most importantly: carmakers have joined the game themselves. Digital product manufacturers recruit reviewers by giving them money, but carmakers recruit reviewers by directly hiring their own people. If you look at the top accounts on major automotive platforms today, many of their profiles clearly state "former PR staff at a certain brand" or "former engineer at a certain carmaker". The relationship between reviewers and the reviewed has long been a revolving door. At this point, talking to me about independence and objectivity is like asking a Chinese Football Association official to referee a Chinese Super League match.

04 Daily Chemical and Maternal & Child Products: The Final Stop of Trust, the Front Line of Reputational Collapse

Let's talk about diapers again.

From a professional PR perspective, reviews of daily chemical and maternal & child products are the last areas anyone should touch, and the most prone to accidents, for no other reason: this is the final stop of public trust.

If a digital product review is botched, users lose a few thousand yuan. If a car review is botched, users face risks to their personal safety. If a maternal & child product review is botched, users lose their sense of security about their children's health — this is an unacceptable loss, and the area with the greatest potential for public opinion explosions. The word "formaldehyde" is a nuclear button on the nerves of Chinese parents. That is why a poorly conducted diaper test sparked a public opinion tsunami far larger than any car test.

Moreover, there is a deep chasm of science communication in the daily chemical sector: testing methods, detection limits, dosage and toxicity, standard applicability... these professional issues are all compressed into a single line of "X times the limit" in the short video era. After 2019, a huge number of "ingredient-focused" and "review-focused" bloggers emerged on Xiaohongshu and Douyin. Most of them have almost no professional knowledge reserve, their testing methods are several-yuan test kits bought online, yet they speak with the confidence of an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Some internet celebrities claimed "toothpaste causes cancer", some bloggers claimed "silicone in shampoo clogs hair follicles" — these claims have been debunked by the industry again and again, but they keep popping back up.

Because in this sector, fear is the best-selling commodity. The playbook of first manufacturing fear, then selling safe products, has squeezed the last bit of credibility out of the review industry.

05 Four Major Historical Collapses of Review Credibility

Over my 20-year PR career, I have personally experienced and witnessed four major credibility collapses:

The first one, 2014, Wang Ziran vs Luo Yonghao. The public figure that collapsed was the "independent third party" persona. Since then, all commercial relationships of review agencies have become the subject of public scrutiny.

The second one, around 2018, the "dealer rating scandal" involving platforms like Autohome. When media platforms charge fees from both automakers and car dealers, their rating system becomes a tool to collect protection money. This incident shattered the fairness of the "rating system" itself.

The third one, 2021, a maternal formula milk review self-media was exposed to be employed by a competing brand. This incident shattered the authenticity of "test data" — the data itself was technically real, but every step of sampling, sample submission, and report interpretation could be designed in a targeted manner. This is the most sophisticated form of black PR: there is no need to forge data, you only need to selectively present real data.

The fourth one is happening right now. The diaper formaldehyde incident and the Zunjie brake test scandal combined to shatter the very legitimacy of the entire industry: consumers are starting to ask an ultimate question — if every review has a biased stance, why should I even read reviews?

06 What Are the Boundaries of Reviews? A Veteran Shares Some Unwritten Industry Rules

After talking so much, it is time to share some practical insights. How can review credibility be maintained? Everything I have seen, done, and avoided in this industry can be summed up in five points, all of which are lessons learned from blood, sweat, and tears.

First, testing capabilities and content distribution capabilities must be separated. Once you take a sponsorship from Company A, you permanently lose the qualification to review Company A and its direct competitors. This is not a moral requirement, it is a physical separation. A real firewall is not a public statement, it is a complete non-interaction of interests. Consumer Reports dares to print its recommendation logo on Walmart shelves, because it has not taken a single cent of advertising money from manufacturers for 50 years. Which Chinese review media dares to adopt a pure subscription model? Which one can survive for more than three months? This is the real problem: the root cause of the credibility crisis has never been a single bad person, but the entire business model.

Second, public disclosure of methodology is the lifeline of reviews. Your test environment, sample sources, control groups, and error margins must all be made public, to allow peer reproduction. The first thing that was torn apart in the Zunjie controversy was the loophole of "not disclosing test conditions". The only difference between a review and a rumor is reproducibility: if other people can follow your method and run the test again, and get matching figures, you are doing a review. If not, you are just telling a story.

Third, review content released as institutional media must have access thresholds. Policy allows personal reviews to be legal, there is no problem with that — everyone has the right to share their own usage experience. But once you publish "test reports" or "review conclusions" under the name of an institution, you cross the boundary of UGC and enter the field of professional communication, so you must be restricted by relevant qualifications, processes, and responsibilities. There must be a clear legal red line between "personal experience" and "professional conclusion", and the era of straddling both sides should end.

Fourth, be wary of "fear marketing", the opiate of the review industry. I advise all brands to stay far away from review accounts that grew popular using terms like "exceeding limits", "carcinogenic", and "formaldehyde", and I advise all readers to stay vigilant. If all the content a review account publishes is telling you "everything around you is hurting you", it is not doing reviews, it is running an anxiety business. And the end point of the anxiety business is always product sales — selling you fear, then selling you the antidote, acting as referee, player, and drug peddler all at once.

Fifth, manufacturers should take responsibility for real flaws, instead of buying off reviewers. This point is for brand owners. The dumbest PR strategy I have seen in these 20 years is to buy off review agencies after a crisis breaks out. You buy off one, ten more pop up. You send one lawyer's letter, and the screenshot will be circulated for ten years. The correct approach is: build a transparent communication mechanism, welcome qualified institutions to conduct tests using public methods, take responsibility for real flaws and make corrections, and legally fight back against fake data. If Zunjie's handling of this incident can stick to the eight principles of "transparent process, reproducible data", it could even become a turning point in the history of Chinese automotive reviews.

07 Where Is the Industry Heading? Reviews Will Not Die, But Will Diversify

Finally, I will share some of my judgments.

The review industry will never die. Information asymmetry will always exist, consumers will always face decision-making costs, and the demand for "someone to check things on my behalf" will never disappear. But the reputation built through two decades of unregulated, wild growth has reached a point where it has to be torn down and rebuilt.

My judgment is that reviews will split into two distinct categories:

The first category is entertainment-focused experience content, which is what UP creators on Bilibili and Xiaohongshu produce. Its essence is an "amplifier of public folk word-of-mouth". The audience watches it for a sense of authenticity and companionship, so we do not need to demand strict professionalism from it, but we should legislate to force full disclosure of commercial relationships, so that it returns to the essence of "sharing" instead of pretending to be "professional testing".

The other category is a truly professional third-party testing and evaluation system, which will be a heavy-asset, low-return, slow-developing industry. Its possible form will be: led by non-profit organizations, funded by consumer subscriptions or public welfare funds, with full public disclosure of methodology, and subject to judicial-level audits. No one in the Chinese market has ever successfully walked this path, because no one is willing to pay for it.

So the real breakthrough point is not in the hands of review agencies, but in the hands of consumers: are