China Censors Photo of Winning Athletes Over Tiananmen Massacre Hint

A widely shared photograph of two track stars was purged from Chinese social networks this week over a completely incidental reference to the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

In what appeared to be another instance of hypersensitive censors at work, the picture of embracing Chinese athletes Lin Yuwei and Wu Yanni disappeared from posts on social media app Weibo after the pair had competed in the women's 100m hurdles final at the Asian Games in Hangzhou, in China's eastern Zhejiang province, on Sunday.

Lin, the gold medal winner, and Wu, who placed second before her disqualification for a false start, hugged after the event. However, social media users soon noticed that the photograph in question was no longer displaying in their posts. Other images of the track stars remained.

Chinese internet users familiar with China's highly regulated information environment—sometimes called the "Great Firewall"—speculated that the picture was scrubbed due the easy-to-miss hint at the Tiananmen incident, formed by Lin and Wu's competition numbers, 6 and 4. The numbers have come to represent June 4, the date of the Communist Party's bloody crackdown on democracy protests 34 years ago.

The anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre is now only marked by activists outside of China. Within its borders, even the vaguest of references to the incident result in online censorship ranging from account restrictions to permanent bans, often to the bewilderment of the individuals on the receiving end.

China's sophisticated internet filters and fast-acting online censorship apparatus have also blocked access to Western social media websites like Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, for over a decade, further insulating its citizens from external debate and discussion. Access to popular apps like Instagram are only possible via government-approved virtual private networks.

Chinese netizens have adopted clever codes, often in the form of puns, to circumvent filters on forbidden topics. For a time, Weibo users who wanted to complain about government corruption utilized a homonym written in different Chinese characters, but the country's ever-vigilant censors eventually caught on.

Responding to the latest removal of the Asian Games photo, one social media user mused that the Chinese Communist Party still remained unconcerned about the "Streisand effect," the unintended phenomenon of bringing unwanted attention to the very subject one is attempting to cover up.

First organized in 1951 in New Dehli, India, and taking place every four years, the Asian Games are second only to the Olympics in their scale. This year's competition, which closes on October 8, features 40 sports and 41 participating countries.