In Qatar, the maskless fans at the World Cup are joyfully screaming, packed elbow-to-elbow in crowded stadiums, seemingly having a wonderful time.
The image presents a direct contrast to China, where continuing “zero-Covid” policies have limited large crowds, forced occasional involuntary lockdowns and ensured consistent mask usage in public. Seeing the freewheeling fun outside the country’s borders had some people on Chinese social media asking: Why not us?
As China convulses from a rare outpouring of civil unrest, with protests springing up in major cities across the country against Covid restrictions, social media users and journalists in China have begun to notice they are not seeing the same crowd shots that the rest of the world sees in their broadcasts. In one example captured by Mark Dreyer, the founder of China Sports Insider, a close-up on Croatian fans was replaced on CCTV, China’s state-owned television station, with an image of Canada’s coach.
Similar videos have circulated widely on WeChat, the popular Chinese app, and have been spotted by other journalists.
CCTV has long been cautious about live sports broadcasts over which it has no control, said Dreyer, the author of “Sporting Superpower: An Insider’s View on China’s Quest to Be the Best.” In 2004, a brief image of Tiananmen Square from 1989 was shown during the Super Bowl, sinking the N.F.L.’s growth in China and ensuring greater care by television officials in the future, he said.
The games are shown on about a 30-second delay in China, giving CCTV officials time to replace close-up shots of screaming fans with other available camera shots, often of coaches or the bench, Dreyer said.
The changes are not major. Some crowd shots are still shown, but most are replaced, he said.
The growing awareness of the differences through the viral posts on social media has contributed to the growing frustration in China, Dreyer said.
“It’s kind of one of those moments where you get a peek around the curtain, and you realize you’re being fed some kind of manipulated narrative,” he said.
The growing frustration with Covid restrictions, which has bubbled over into a rare display of antigovernment sentiment after a deadly fire in the Xinjiang region, has been increasingly felt in the sports sector, as most of the rest of the world has moved on with its large-scale events.
Sports fans in China have taken note of full stadiums in Britain for the Premier League and packed N.B.A. arenas in the United States and Canada. There was a large backlash on social media after the World Cup’s opening ceremony, Dreyer said.
“That’s where people kind of said, well, hang on, how come we’ve got 60-, 70,000 people jumping up and down in close, confined quarters with no masks?” he said. “That’s obviously a stark contrast with what’s going on for the majority of people in China today, where a lot of people are confined to homes, working from home, wearing masks, testing on a daily or near-daily basis. And certainly not going to big sporting events like this.”
