China censors images from grandstands in game broadcasts

Chinese state television CCTV is censoring images from the stands at World Cup games after the sight of thousands of fans without masks heightened popular dissatisfaction with the “zero covid” strategy.

In a comparison made by Lusa during the France-Denmark game this weekend, between the CCTV broadcast and that of a foreign broadcaster, it appears that the Chinese public authority is replacing images of fans in the stands with images of the players or the technical team, using a delay of about 30 seconds.

For example, during last Thursday’s CCTV broadcast of the Portugal-Ghana game, the Portuguese team sang the anthem twice, also aiming to replace images of fans in the stands.

The opening ceremony of the World Cup in Qatar, followed by millions of Chinese, highlighted the contrast between China, which is pursuing a “zero cases” COVID-19 strategy, and the rest of the world, with netizens sarcastically wondering if they really live on another planet.

“The World Cup has started and there is absolute silence in Beijing,” Jessica, a Chinese flight attendant based in the Chinese capital, described in a widely shared WeChat comment. “I feel like I’m at the bottom of a well, looking into a beautiful world that I can’t interact with,” he added. “What then is the purpose of life?”

This spawned the #SeráQueWeAusNoMesmoPlaneta thread on Chinese social media.

Many Chinese, who have so far been limited to information related to official bodies that continue to describe the outside world as “ravaged by the virus” rather than a safe China, have been baffled by the lack of social distancing rules and fans without masks.

It comes at a time when Covid-19 outbreaks have forced new, severely restrictive measures in Beijing, Guangzhou and dozens of other small cities in China. The Covid-19 “zero cases” strategy includes lockdowns of entire cities, constant mass testing, and isolation of all positive cases and their direct contacts in designated facilities, often under humiliating conditions. China has also virtually closed its borders since March 2020.

Hundreds of groups of Beijing residents fled their condominiums this weekend, effectively violating China’s epidemic prevention measures, as anti-restriction demonstrations swept through several cities in the Asian nation. In some cases, protesters raised slogans against Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.

Large-scale protests in an Asian country are extremely rare.

The demonstrations were mostly peaceful. However, in Guangzhou, the largest city in southern China, the Haizhu area has become the scene of violent clashes between migrant workers and security forces. In the central city of Zhengzhou, the factory of Foxconn, the group that assembles North American Apple iPhones, also saw violent episodes between workers and security forces last week.