According to a report an image from the Asian Games in Hangzhou, China may have sparked controversy plus a great deal of curiosity both inside and outside the host country lately.
A photograph of the two elite Chinese female athletes embracing after the conclusion of the women's 100m hurdles finals on 1 October was said to have been removed from Chinese social media.
Apparently, it is because it could unintentionally remind people of the bloody Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4 1989 - deemed as “sensitive” by the authorities there.
According to the report, discussions of the killings and protests relating to the incident are still strictly controlled in China with references to it being often scrubbed from the internet.
Furthermore, the report stated that posts on Weibo - China's popular social media site - showed the photo of the athletes with "grey squares" instead of the number 6 and 4 on the bibs!
However the portal did acknowledge that some other Chinese news articles had shown images of the two athletes with their bib numbers intact.
Apparently, internet censorship in China is done on ad hoc basis with monitoring done manually by humans who will decide the types of content to restrict.
In fact, Weibo is said to have 1,000 employed supervisors tasked with flagging pornographic, illegal and harmful content; it is also one of China's biggest social media platforms with over 600 million monthly users!
However, according to another news report from Asia, despite several western media outlets such as CNN and BBC having reported that the image has been “censored”, apparently Chinese state media including China Central Television (CCTV) had in fact published the photo where Lin Yuwei from lane 6 (the eventual gold medal winner) had embraced her compatriot Wu Yanni from lane 4.
The same website also reported that contrary to what CNN had claimed the “6-4” numbers were not removed from the photo.
In fact, according to them, it is still available on Chinese news outlets such as Southcn.com as well as on popular social media platforms Douyin and Weibo.
So did some western media deliberately shine the spotlight on the incident to “sensationalise” it - even though they were aware that it may not be entirely true?
Whatever it is, if such an incident had happened here in Malaysia, without doubt, it would have prompted thousands of punters scrambling to the nearest gaming outlet to try their luck with the “lucky number" - hoping to finally hit the jackpot!
JK Joseph is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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