OLYMPIC GAMES: Tears And Cyberbullying On The Ice In Beijing
The musical Sunset Boulevard was playing when Zhu Yi, dressed in a red suit, appeared on the rink on Monday to represent China in the women's single free skating final. She fell twice in a row to the ground shortly after starting to roll.
The day before, during the team event, Zhu crashed into the wall after missing a jump on her opening combination. Then she failed again on another jump. She finished with the lowest score in figure skating on the day.
"What a shame Zhu Yi"; "How ridiculous is your performance"; "How dare you skate for China?" ; "You can't even compare to an amateur"; "Don't cry, I'm the one who wants to cry." A shower of criticism fell on the skater on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter. Zhu cried, cried a lot. On both Sunday and Monday she broke down in tears after failing on the ice at the Winter Olympics.
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Both days, the hashtag "Zhu Yi has fallen" became a trend on Weibo with more than 200 million views within a few hours. The app later censored the criticism. But it was already late. Cyberbullying had spread across other Chinese platforms in the form of memes and more insults.
Zhu Yi is 19 years old and was born Beverly Zhu in Los Angeles. The daughter of a family of Chinese immigrants, she decided in 2018 to renounce her US citizenship to represent China and changed her name.
"I guess I felt a lot of pressure because I know everyone in China was quite surprised with the women's singles selection and I really wanted to show them what I was capable of, but unfortunately I didn't. I'm a bit embarrassed ," Zhu told local media. after his first performance. She does not speak Mandarin fluently, something many Chinese nationalists seized on to continue criticizing her online. "Please let her learn Chinese first before she talks about patriotism," one user blurted out.
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Other supporters began to point out that Zhu's Olympic choice was due to the high-ranking connections of his father, Zhu Songchun , a renowned scientist who is dean at Peking University's School of Artificial Intelligence.
A treatment that contrasts with that received by Eileen Gu, also born in California, and who on Tuesday won gold in acrobatic skiing in the Freeski Big specialty. Gu, unlike Zhu, speaks native Mandarin. She is the face of these Olympics for China. The story of online harassment of a Chinese athlete was also repeated at the last Summer Olympics in Tokyo. There were tears from embarrassed Chinese athletes, even for failing to win gold.
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The mixed doubles table tennis team apologized tearfully on public television in their country for winning the silver medal. "You have failed the entire nation," read one of the many criticisms on Weibo. Li Junhui and Liu Yuchen had to ask for another much more vehement pardon for losing the men's doubles badminton final to Taiwan, the island that China considers a breakaway province.
The networks burned against their players for the defeat when one of the Taiwanese gold medalists, Wang Chi-Lin, wrote on Facebook "I am from Taiwan, a few hours after listening to the Chinese anthem on the podium. At least in table tennis and badminton they had won the silver medal. The shooter Wang Luyao had a worse time after being left out of the women's 10-meter air rifle final, being one of the favorites.
There were many insults they received on Weibo. So much so that Beijing's vilifying machinery, accustomed to using its digital soldiers to erase criticism of the regime, used its censorship powers to remove many of the comments attacking the athlete and sanction 33 users without being able to post online. social for 180 days.
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