Leapmotor has joined a growing roster of Chinese automakers offering large cash rewards for information that helps them identify and punish online ‘‘black PR’’ attacks. In a March 2 social-media statement titled an appeal to ‘‘build a clean cyberspace’’, the company opened a public tip line and pledged rewards ranging from ¥50,000 to ¥5,000,000 for verifiable leads that lead to official action.
The company set out a broad remit for reporting: fabricated stories that harm Leapmotor’s commercial reputation or product image, maliciously edited text, images or video, reviving and twisting old reports, extortion or manufactured supervision designed to pressure the firm, and impersonation of government bodies, experts or media. Leapmotor said rewards would be paid only when submitted evidence is legally sourced, verified by the company and — crucially — accepted and acted on by judicial or law-enforcement authorities; the first person to provide decisive evidence in a given case takes the prize if there are multiple tipsters.
The move is not incidental to the company’s fortunes. Leapmotor, founded in December 2015 as a technology-driven electric-vehicle firm, reported deliveries of 596,555 vehicles in the previous year, a year-on-year rise of 103 percent that put it atop China’s ‘‘new forces’’ of carmakers. The firm’s monthly deliveries have exceeded 70,000 at their peak and were 32,059 and 28,067 in the first two months of this year — numbers that make brand reputation a direct commercial concern.
Other manufacturers have adopted similar tactics. BYD began an anti-black-PR reward programme in 2021 and has raised its top bounty to ¥5,000,000; NIO’s legal department publicly sought tips last year offering ¥10,000–¥1,000,000; Harmony Zhixing and Zeekr have also announced reward ranges up to ¥5,000,000 in recent weeks. Beijing has signalled support: last September six ministries including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology launched a nationwide campaign to clean up ‘‘automotive-sector online chaos’’, identifying water armies, AI-generated disinformation and coordinated smear campaigns as priority problems.
The trend reflects a new front in the reputational wars of China’s fiercely competitive EV sector. As production volumes rise and model line-ups proliferate, social-media narratives increasingly shape consumer perception and secondary-market values. Corporates are therefore incentivised to supplement legal remedies and platform takedowns with crowd-sourced intelligence, turning customers and the public into voluntary monitors of the information environment.
But these programmes carry risks. Reward-driven reporting can encourage hasty or opportunistic submissions, create incentives for rival companies or unscrupulous actors to weaponise allegations, and outsource investigative work to actors with varying standards of evidence. They also place pressure on courts and enforcement agencies to process what may become a large volume of tip-driven complaints, and may not be sufficient to deter technically sophisticated threats such as AI deepfakes and coordinated, platform-spanning disinformation campaigns.
For regulators and platforms the challenge is operational as much as legal. Effective mitigation will require better detection tools, cross-platform cooperation and clearer rules on evidence and privacy, as well as expedited judicial pathways for provable abuses. Leapmotor’s announcement is likely to deter low-cost smear operations, but whether it will meaningfully curb the most harmful forms of digital manipulation depends on follow-through by law enforcement, platform gatekeepers and--ultimately--the courts.
In short, Leapmotor’s high-value bounty is another signal that reputation management has become a strategic battleground in China’s auto industry. The announcement underscores corporate reliance on public-sourced intelligence and state-backed cleanup campaigns, while raising questions about the balance between defending brands and safeguarding a transparent, accountable online public sphere.