China dials down vitriol against US-born skater Zhu Yi a notch

Authorities are reining in online attacks on a US-born Chinese figure skater, as Beijing hosts the Winter Olympics.

Zhu Yi takes a tumble during the team event this week. Picture: Getty Images

Geopolitical rivalry between the US and China has at times threatened to boil over and scorch the Winter Olympics.

Now, Beijing appears to be trying to dial down the heat.

Chinese internet users have gushed with praise for Eileen Gu while savaging Beverly Zhu, also known as Zhu Yi – two US-born athletes competing for Team China who have become lightning rods for nationalist sentiment.

After days of heated online discourse, China is scrubbing some of those comments from the web and cordoning off others from further discussion, in what appears to be a bid to rein in vitriol and present a happier, more hospitable face as the Olympic host.

Zhu, a figure-skater who relinquished her US citizenship to compete for China, was initially criticised and ridiculed after tumbling twice and finishing last during a team event on Sunday. Online commenters questioned Zhu’s motivations and her very legitimacy in representing China.

On Weibo platform, the hashtag #ZhuYiFellDown, which mocked the Olympic debut of Zhu and had been viewed more than 200 million times, suddenly became unsearchable, apparently sometime late on Sunday.

Now, attacks on social media against Zhu, a 19-year-old born in California, have given way to overwhelmingly positive comments and notes of encouragement.

“What everyone said on the internet rather affected me,” Zhu told the state-run Xinhua news agency on Monday. “The problem now is psychological. I will try not to be affected by the outside world.”

On the other hand, San Francisco-born Gu has enjoyed near-universal praise in China, particularly after emerging with a gold medal in the big air free skiing competition on Tuesday.

Eileen Gu celebrates on the podium after claiming a gold medal. Picture: AFP

Gu, who has become a magnet for controversy in the US, attacked for competing for the Chinese team, has spoken up in Zhu’s defence.

“Mistakes and pressure are all part of sports,” she said, adding that she had watched Zhu training and admired her.

Though China’s internet is, in general, tightly controlled by authorities, it can also be a boisterous place where allegiances to country and to individual stars are fiercely defended.

It is unclear why China’s internet authorities intervened in Zhu’s case, but she has been accused of having taken her Olympic slot from Chen Hongyi, a China-born figure skater.

After Zhu missed two jumps during the women’s short program team event, some social-media users in China called her a disgrace and told her to “go back to America”.

Some commenters questioned the reasons she was selected for the team, noting that her father is a leading artificial intelligence expert who moved to Beijing’s Peking University in 2020 from the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Before I even started, I guess I just put a lot of pressure because I know everybody in China was pretty surprised with the selection for ladies, and I just really wanted to show them what I was able to do. But unfortunately I didn’t,” a tearful Zhu said after her double tumble.

Hu Xijin, the former editor in chief of Global Times, among China’s loudest nationalist voices online, condemned the attacks on Zhu.

“Venting emotions on this young athlete personally and using social media to hit someone when she’s down because she made mistakes, that’s cyber-bullying, and in any case it’s gone too far,” he wrote on Weibo.

Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies China’s internet and censorship, suspects authorities came to believe the attacks on Zhu, which had grown out of the idea that the US and China are inveterate foes, had gotten out of hand.

The rivalry had overtly coloured the discussions of China’s US-born athletes online, leading people to think they either brought glory or had become a burden to the country, said Dr Xiao. “Lots of those opinions were not organised by the government, but they were a product of this longtime government propaganda.”

The Wall Street Journal