Chinese soccer team Shandong Taishan have raised eyebrows and fueled rumors with their sudden withdrawal from a match in the AFC Asian Champions League Elite, mere hours before they were due to take the field against South Korean rivals Ulsan HD. The Shandong team’s unexpected absence from Wednesday’s match in the southeastern city of Ulsan, South Korea, automatically triggered their expulsion from the entire competition. Now, if the results of all of Shandong Taishan’s previous matches are nullified, as stipulated by competition regulations, league standings will be thrown into chaos by creating an unequal number of matches played among the teams.
A statement from Shandong Taishan, four-time Chinese Super League winners, sought to explain their puzzling decision: “Due to serious physical discomfort of some of the players [and] after evaluation by the medical team, the players were unable to form a team to participate in the AFC Asian Champions League Elite match against Ulsan HD. We deeply regret this and apologise to the Asian Football Confederation, Ulsan HD and the fans.”
But many fans and observers, not buying this vague excuse, speculated that the real reason for Shandong skipping the match was a fear that South Korean fans were planning to humiliate the Chinese team by displaying signs referencing the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. (There were even some viral photos of South Korean fans holding such signs, but they were almost certainly AI-generated fakes.) This rampant speculation followed a February 14 match between Shandong Taishan and South Korean club Gwangju FC in which Shandong’s 3:1 victory was overshadowed by the unsporting behavior of some of the Chinese home-team spectators. At that match, Shandong Taishan fans notoriously trolled the visiting team by holding up portraits of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and former South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan—a strongman who came to power in a military coup, imposed martial law, and ordered the brutal 1980 Gwangju Massacre. (Afterward, Shandong Taishan duly reported the offending fans to the police and banned them from attending matches for life.)
At a match in Taishan, Shandong on February 14, Chinese fans troll visiting team Gwangju FC by holding up portraits of former South Korean military strongman Chun Doo-hwan, who ordered the May 1980 “Gwangju Massacre” against protesters in that city.
Addressing rumors about South Korean soccer fans planning to get their “revenge” by displaying images or memes referencing “June 4” or the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, Chinese netizen “十号向前冲” advised:
When your opponent is better armed with memes (with which to humiliate you), it’s best not to provoke them. [Chinese]
Although “humiliating defeats” on the playing field are nothing new for many fans of Chinese soccer, such a politically charged humiliation would be unacceptable to the Chinese Communist Party, which routinely censors any and all online content related to the 1989 Tiananmen protests and their deadly aftermath. Among the many examples of past “June 4” censorship: a 2022 censored essay titled “June Is Not a Time for Forgetting”; state-media outlet People’s Daily having to disavow its own Asian Games promotional video for inadvertent June 4 references; a hug at the 2023 Asian Games in Hangzhou between two Chinese hurdlers wearing bibs numbered “6” and “4,” respectively; and a crackdown on memes featuring “objects placed in a row,” evoking the row of tanks in the famed “Tank Man” photograph.
Perhaps the biggest gaffe of all was committed by China’s “Lipstick King” and e-commerce titan Li Jiaqi when, with exquisitely poor timing, he attempted to hawk a tank-shaped ice-cream cake during a June 3, 2022 broadcast on his Taobao online shopping channel. Platform censors quickly pulled the plug on the broadcast, and Li was banned from live-streaming for four months. The ensuing controversy only served to amplify the sensitive anniversary by spreading awareness of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre among young Chinese netizens. From then on, what is known in the west as the “Streisand Effect”—that is, inadvertently drawing attention to the very phenomenon you were trying to suppress—came to be known in China as the “Li Jiaqi Paradox.” It remains to be seen whether Shandong Taishan’s startling decision to drop out of the AFC Asian Champions League Elite competition will prove to be a similar paradox, drawing attention to a sensitive anniversary that the CCP would prefer to remain buried.
