In recent years, when Chinese athletes have been accused of doping, the government has mobilized its propaganda apparatus of state-run newspapers, television commentators and social media accounts to defend the athletes and deflect criticism of China’s sports system.
This time, facing anger from rival Olympians and accusations of a cover-up over the revelation that 23 elite Chinese swimmers had tested positive for a banned substance before competing at the 2021 Olympics, China is taking a different approach: virtual silence.
While the issue is widely discussed abroad, including in Congress last week, Chinese media coverage has been limited to a handful of brief official statements. Censors have meticulously removed and limited online discussions of the dispute, a level of censorship that experts say is rare outside of the most politically sensitive topics.
The change of tactics, experts say, reflects what is at stake for China weeks before the Olympics begin in Paris. Eleven of the 23 swimmers who tested positive in 2021 have been called up to the team that will travel to Paris. Swimming is one of China’s most prominent sports, in which Beijing invested heavily over the decades to build the country into an Olympic power.
China has denied allegations of wrongdoing and has long sought to clean up its sports sector, stepping up controls following doping scandals in the 1990s and early 2000s. That makes suggestions of a cover-up deeply embarrassing for China, where athletics plays a huge role in burnishing the image of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
“There is basically no media coverage of this in China, which is very different from before, when other Chinese athletes have been accused of doping,” said Haozhou Pu, an associate professor at the University of Dayton who studies sports in China.
Mr. Pu said the authorities were most likely hoping the story, which was published by The New York Times in April, would die down before the start of the Olympics so it would not distract the Chinese public or China’s swimming team. That may explain China’s subdued response, Mr. Pu said.
“No news can be good news,” Pu said.
When China’s most famous swimmer, Sun Yang, was accused of doping in 2018, state media scrutinized the impartiality of the investigation with widespread coverage, and social media users were allowed to leave hundreds of thousands of comments expressing support for Mr. Sun.
By comparison, state media coverage of the 23 swimmers has been largely limited to official statements. Chinese authorities have said the swimmers’ positive test results in 2021 were based on trace amounts of the banned substance coming from contaminated food, an explanation some experts have questioned. The swimmers themselves have not commented publicly.
Chinese media have carried statements from the Chinese Foreign Ministry saying the country has a zero-tolerance policy on doping, and from China’s anti-doping agency, Chinada, questioning The Times’ reporting and accusing the paper of violating “media ethics and morals.” One exception was an editorial in the Global Times, a Communist Party newspaper, which accused rival nations 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 testing,” “banned drugs,” “doping swimming,” and “Chinese swimming team” mostly return posts of Chinese news articles that uniformly contain official statements from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and anti-doping agency.
In 2022, internet censors allowed Weibo users to support Lyu Xiaojun, an Olympic gold medal-winning weightlifter who was suspended for doping. Dozens of Chinese social media users accused “Westerners” of framing Lyu.
Most notably, in 2012, Chinese state media came to the defence of teenage sensation Ye Shiwen, a swimmer whose record-breaking victory in the 400-metre individual medley at the London Games was met with suggestions she may have used performance-enhancing drugs.
Ye, who was 16 at the time, never tested positive and many in China found the allegations outrageous. China’s state broadcaster praised her for enduring “humiliation” at the hands of “psychologically unbalanced Western media.” (Ye, who is not among the 23 swimmers, will compete in Paris next month.)
Xiao Qiang, an expert on Chinese censorship at the University of California, Berkeley, said the level of censorship surrounding the current dispute over the 23 swimmers is similar to that which would be applied to discussions of far more sensitive topics, such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protesters and elections in Taiwan, the de facto independent democratic island claimed by Beijing, Xiao said.
He noted that this also appears to be the first time censors have imposed a blanket ban on online comments criticizing athletes accused of doping. Previously, comments expressing disapproval of athletes sometimes slipped through the cracks, as in the case of Sun, a polarizing figure who some Chinese internet users viewed as arrogant and deserving of his subsequent doping ban.
The scandal comes at a bad time for China’s top sporting authority, the General Administration of Sport, 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 results could raise questions among the Chinese public about how competently swimming officials manage their athletes.
Chinada claims the 23 swimmers were unintentionally contaminated with traces of a banned substance called trimetazidine, or TMZ, a drug used to treat patients with heart disease that can also help athletes increase endurance and speed up recovery times. Chinada said the swimmers ingested TMZ through contaminated food from a hotel kitchen. He did not explain how the substance ended up on the athletes’ plates.
U.S. officials and other experts, citing protocol, said the swimmers should have been suspended or publicly identified pending further investigation. They said the failure to do so fell on 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.
This month, The Times revealed that three of the 23 swimmers had tested positive for another performance-enhancing substance several years earlier. They had also avoided being publicly identified or suspended.
WADA confirmed that the positive test results detected “trace amounts” of the banned substance, known as clenbuterol, a drug 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 contaminated by tainted food, but did not explain why China did not comply with rules requiring them to publicly disclose the positive results.
Olivia Wang and Juan Liu Contributed reporting.
