As protestors demonstrate against COVID restrictions across China, the country’s state-owned broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) has taken to editing out footage of maskless fans in its coverage of the World Cup. China is still using daily testing, social distancing, masks, and lockdowns to stamp out COVID infections—in stark contrast to the lax restrictions in Qatar and elsewhere.

While the CCTV has not cut out crowd close-ups completely, it has instead opted to show images of managers, team benches, and longer footage of team members celebrating to avoid showing footage of the cheering fans. CCTV is playing the matches with a 30-second delay, giving the censors more time to quickly edit the footage to ensure it complies with Beijing’s rulebook.

This year’s winter World Cup is the first major international sporting event that has been held with relaxed COVID restrictions, where fans are free to mingle maskless with no social distancing required in stadiums and crowd zones.  

“Chinese broadcasters are notoriously cautious of crowd shots at international sporting events because of what might be seen—like Tibetan flags, for example,” Mark Dreyer, author of Sporting Superpower: An Insider’s View on China’s Quest to Be the Best tweeted on Saturday.

“There have been widespread reports about Chinese fans reacting—none too happily—to [thousands] of unmasked fans gathering daily in Qatar, while back in China, many people are stuck watching at home,” Dreyer said, adding that there was a massive reaction on WeChat after the World Cup Opening Ceremony showed “about 80,000 people in the stadium and hardly a mask in sight.”

Disquiet grows online

While Chinese broadcasters have tried to stamp out images of large crowds in Doha and other cities, Weibo users in China have still been sharing comments online expressing their anger at China’s draconian COVID policies.

“You can’t see anyone wearing a mask at the World Cup, since everyone in China knows that all the foreigners are dead, we should just keep doing COVID tests and keep locking down then,” one Weibo user sarcastically wrote, according to Bloomberg.

After videos emerged on Weibo of hundreds of Japanese fans flooding Tokyo’s Shibuya junction after China’s neighbor unexpectedly beat Germany 2-1, Reuters reported, one user commented: “Is this the same world as ours?”

Others sarcastically mocked China’s restrictions in comments. “Have they done a COVID test?” asked one user, mocking daily testing requirements in some parts of China. “Why aren’t they wearing masks?” asked another.

“The Qatar World Cup tells us that the rest of the world has returned to normal,” wrote another Weibo user. “It’s not sustainable for us to maintain this state of shutdown.”

Online anger takes to the streets

Protests in China erupted after a fire broke out in an apartment building on Thursday, killing at least 10, in the city of Urumqi—where some have been locked in their homes for four months. This prompted an outcry of angry questions as to whether firefighters or people trying to escape had been blocked by locked doors.

Soon protests spread to major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where many protestors held up blank pieces of paper to express their discontent with lockdowns and Chinese government censorship. At least eight cities saw demonstrators crowd streets, with some even calling for China’s President Xi Jinping to resign and for an end to one-party rule.

The protests led to a slump in Chinese markets on Monday, as uncertainty gripped traders. The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index fell by almost 2%, while the onshore yuan weakened 0.6% against the dollar.

Xi Jinping now faces a difficult choice: Either rapidly dismantle COVID-zero, which could fuel a surge in infections and deaths and undercut Xi’s efforts to cast China’s pandemic response as superior to the West; or crack down on protests, which may build more public sympathy for the cause.  

China reported a record 40,052 daily cases on Monday.