In recent years, when Chinese athletes have been accused of doping, the government has mobilized its propaganda apparatus of state newspapers, television commentators and social media accounts to defend the athletes and deflect criticism of China’s sports system.
This time, facing the anger of rival Olympians and accusations of cover-up the revelation After 23 elite Chinese swimmers tested positive for a banned substance before competing in the 2021 Olympics, China is taking a different approach: virtual silence.
While the issue is the subject of much debate abroad, including in Congress Last week, Chinese media coverage was limited to a handful of succinct official statements. Censors meticulously scrubbed and limited online discussion of the conflict — a level of censorship that experts say is rare outside of the most politically sensitive topics.
Experts say the shift in tactics reflects the stakes for China just weeks before the Paris Olympics. Eleven of the 23 swimmers who tested positive in 2021 have been selected to compete in the Paris Games. Swimming is one of China’s most prominent sports, in which Beijing has invested heavily over decades to build the country into an Olympic powerhouse.
China has denied the accusations of wrongdoing. It has long sought to clean up its sports sector, stepping up testing after doping scandals in the 1990s and early 2000s. That makes suggestions of a cover-up deeply embarrassing for China, where sports competitions play an outsized role in boosting the image of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
“There is virtually no media coverage of this case in China, which is very different from previous years when other Chinese athletes were accused of doping,” said Haozhou Pu, an associate professor at the University of Dayton who studies sports in China.
Mr. Pu said officials probably hope that the story, which was reported The New York Times published an article in April that faded before the Olympics began so as not to distract the Chinese public or the Chinese swimming team. That may explain China’s muted response, Pu said.
“No news can be good news,” Mr. Pu said.
When China’s most famous swimmer, Sun Yang, was accused of doping in 2018, state media reviewed the fairness of the investigation with extended coverageAnd social media users were allowed to leave hundreds of thousands of comments expressing support for Mr Sun.
By comparison, official media coverage of the 23 swimmers has been largely limited to official statements. Chinese authorities have said the swimmers’ positive tests in 2021 were due to tiny amounts of the banned substance from contaminated food, an explanation that some experts have questioned. The swimmers themselves have made no public comment.
Chinese media reported statements from China’s Foreign Ministry claiming that the country has a zero-tolerance policy on doping, and statements from China’s anti-doping agency, Chinada, disputing the Times’ reporting and accusing the newspaper of violating “media ethics and morality.” One exception was an editorial in the Global Times, a Communist Party newspaper, which accused rival countries of “intentionally manipulating the doping issue” and “smearing China’s swimming program.”
Discussion of the story also appears to be heavily censored on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform similar to X. Searches for terms such as “doping,” “drug test,” “banned drugs,” “doping swimming,” and “Chinese swimming team” mostly bring up Chinese news articles that uniformly contain official statements from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and China’s anti-doping agency.
As recently as 2022, internet censors allowed Weibo users to rally behind Lyu Xiaojun, an Olympic gold medalist weightlifter suspended for doping. Many Chinese social media users blamed “Westerners” for framing Mr. Lyu.
Particularly in 2012, Chinese state media came to the defense of teenage sensation Ye Shiwen, a swimmer whose record-breaking victory in the 400m individual medley at the London Games was greeted with suggestions that she could have used performance-enhancing drugs.
Ms. Ye, who was 16 at the time, never tested positive, and many in China considered the allegations outrageous. Chinese state television praised her for enduring “humiliation” at the hands of “psychologically unbalanced Western media.” (Ms. Ye, who is not among the 23 swimmers, is competing in Paris.)
Xiao Qiang, an expert on Chinese censorship at the University of California, Berkeley, said the level of censorship applied to the current dispute over the 23 swimmers is similar to what would be applied to discussions of much more sensitive topics. Those topics include the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protesters and elections in Taiwan, the de facto independent democratic island claimed by Beijing, he added.
He noted that it was also the first time that censors had imposed a blanket ban on online comments criticizing athletes accused of doping. Previously, comments expressing disapproval of athletes sometimes slipped through the cracks, such as that of Mr. Sun, a polarizing figure whom some Chinese netizens viewed as arrogant and deserving of his subsequent doping ban.
The scandal comes at a difficult time for the General Administration of Sports, China’s top sports authority, which oversees the Chinese Olympic Committee. In May, China announced that the authority’s former head, Gou Zhongwen, was under investigation for corruption.
China’s official explanation for the positive tests could raise questions from the Chinese public about how competently swimming officials are handling their athletes.
Chinada claims the 23 swimmers were inadvertently contaminated with traces of a banned substance called trimetazidine, or TMZ, a drug used to treat heart disease and that can also help athletes increase their endurance and speed recovery. Chinada said the swimmers ingested TMZ through contaminated food in a hotel kitchen. She did not explain how the substance ended up on the athletes’ plates.
U.S. officials and other experts, citing the protocol, said the swimmers should have been suspended or publicly identified pending further investigation. They said the failure to do so lay with Chinese sports officials, swimming’s international governing body, World Aquatics, and the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, the Montreal-based global authority that oversees national drug-testing programs.
Last month, The Times revealed Three of the 23 swimmers had tested positive for another doping agent several years earlier. They had also avoided being publicly identified or suspended.
WADA confirmed that the positive tests contained “traces” of clenbuterol, a banned substance commonly found in meat in some countries such as China that can also help athletes increase muscle growth and burn fat. WADA said the three swimmers were infected by tainted food, but it did not explain why China failed to comply with rules that require it to publicly disclose positive tests.
Olivia Wang And Jean Liu contribution to the report.
