On the Chinese internet, wall-to-wall state media coverage of the Chinese Olympic delegation’s departure for the 2024 Paris Games has been met with a shrug. With 405 Chinese athletes slated to compete across 236 events, China is expected to challenge the United States in the national gold medal count. Despite such rosy prognostications, and the Chinese public’s enthusiasm for the 2022 Winter Games held in Beijing (which were partially overshadowed by tennis star Peng Shuai’s #MeToo accusation against a former top Party official), there has been little online fanfare about this summer’s Games, which kick off on Friday. When China’s top party- and state-media outlets published a barrage of photographs documenting the activities of China’s Olympic team, many on Weibo responded with indifference, complaints about the state of the Chinese economy, or concerns over a still-unfolding food safety scandal:
龙标遥寄：Leisure activities are for the rich. Nobody here’s got any money, so nobody here cares.
索伦和肖恩的外公：Times are tough. Who’s got time to pay attention to anything besides their own survival?
xiaofaye_62500：National pride can’t fill your belly.
九月飞花哟：Where’s a job for my son? That’s what I care about.
阿锋111：The economy’s bad, and they can’t even guarantee food safety. Who cares about stuff like [the Olympics]?
事如春meng：All that money and they still don’t invest in food safety.
试着跟它们讲讲理：If we win 100 gold medals, will you give me back my moped? I’ve still got to work as a courier. [Chinese]
Much netizen ire focused on the news that the Chinese delegation will be bringing its own air conditioning units to Paris. In an effort to make the games more environmentally friendly, Paris Olympic organizers did not install air conditioning units in the Olympic Village. A number of countries—including the United States—have rebelled against the measure, citing concerns about how excessive heat might affect their team members’ sleep quality and athletic performances. Many on Weibo remain unconvinced that it is necessary. “At Paris’ current temperature, your parents would curse you out for turning on the AC if it was China,” one commentator said. Others, referencing Xi Jinping’s call for Chinese youth to “eat bitterness,” sarcastically asked, “Where’s all the rhetoric about the virtues of hard work and enduring hardship now?”
State broadcaster CCTV itself became a target of mockery over the size of the reporting team— numbering over 2,000 journalists—that it is sending to Paris. “Why is CCTV sending so many reporters?” asked one Weibo user. “Are they trying to scare the French silly?” “There will be more journalists than athletes,” pointed out another. One Weibo comment simply dismissed CCTV as irrelevant: “I haven’t watched CCTV in 32 years.”
But perhaps the greatest pall hanging over China’s Olympic team is an alleged doping scandal that has implicated its top swimmers. In April, The New York Times reported that 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for the same performance enhancing drug, trimetazidine, in the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics, which were held in 2021. The positive tests were not disclosed at the time. No swimmers were punished by the World Anti-Doping Agency, World Aquatics, or China’s domestic anti-doping body or swimming regulator. The FBI and the U.S. Justice Department are now investigating the positive tests and allegations of a cover-up. Eleven of the swimmers who tested positive are competing in this year’s Olympics. Previous doping allegations against Chinese athletes have been used to fuel nationalist pride. In 2012, after gold-medalist swimmer Ye Shiwen was accused of doping, China’s official media blamed it on “Western pettiness” and anti-Chinese bias. When famed Olympic swimmer Sun Yang was accused of doping in 2018, state media ran extensive critical coverage of the investigation and social media platforms allowed users to post hundreds of thousands of comments supportive of Sun. (After his eight-year ban in 2020, however, censors issued a directive sharply curtailing coverage.) As David Pierson of The New York Times reported, this time around, Chinese censors are enforcing a much stricter ban on discussion of the doping allegations:
Even as the issue is being debated widely abroad, including in Congress last week, Chinese domestic media coverage has been limited to a handful of terse official statements. Censors have meticulously scrubbed and limited online discussions of the dispute — a level of censorship experts say is rare outside the most politically sensitive topics.
[…] “There is basically zero media coverage of this in China, which is very different from before when other Chinese athletes have been accused of doping,” said Haozhou Pu, an associate professor at the University of Dayton who studies sports in China.
[…] Xiao Qiang, an expert on Chinese censorship at the University of California, Berkeley, said that the level of censorship around the current dispute over the 23 swimmers is similar to what would be applied to discussions around far more sensitive subjects. Such topics include the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protesters, and elections in Taiwan, the de facto independent island democracy claimed by Beijing, Mr. Xiao said.
He noted that this also appeared to be the first time censors have imposed a blanket ban on online comments criticizing athletes accused of doping. Before, comments expressing disapproval of athletes sometimes slipped through the cracks, such as with Mr. Sun, a polarizing figure whom some Chinese internet users considered arrogant and deserving of his subsequent ban for doping. [Source]
Some bloggers have drawn oblique connections between the doping scandal and China’s ongoing food scandal. Early this month, a bombshell exposé from the Party-run outlet Beijing News revealed that fuel tanker-trunks had been used to transport cooking oil without being washed or sterilized between transports. The news has snowballed into China’s largest food safety scandal since the 2008 tainted milk and baby-formula scandal. The food safety scandal became conflated with the doping scandal when a chef for the Chinese Olympic ping-pong team revealed that the athletes eat only pork flown in from special state-run farms that do not use “lean-meat powder,” common slang for a class of growth stimulants for pigs that can also double as performance enhancing drugs for humans. The WeChat blog “Planetary Business Review” (星球商业评论, xīngqiú shāngyè pínglùn) expressed the hope that they, too, might have the opportunity to eat food unadulterated by contaminants:
A few days ago, the ping-pong team traveled to Chengdu for a group training session before the Olympics. A chef in charge of the athletes’ meals said that all of their pork is flown in from elsewhere “because you can’t eat the local pork.”
Why can’t they eat pork from Chengdu, the birthplace of twice-cooked pork, Dongpo pork [Ed. note: it is actually from Jiangsu], and the Chenghua pig? The chef never explained, but the news that Chengdu pork cannot be consumed has received considerable media attention.
Everyone knows that the “relevant organs” have issued a ban on feeding “lean-meat powder” to pigs. It is also a banned substance that the World Anti-Doping Agency makes a point of screening for. Years back, news broke that China’s General Administration of Sport set up its own network of meat providers. The pork from those specialty farms costs 20 yuan more per pound than the usual market price.
There’s nothing left to say, beyond this: I, too, want to eat that pork. [Chinese]
