Underage gymnasts still the talk, even in China

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

BEIJING -- There is this impression from afar that Chinese people don’t get much of the news that the rest of the world does because of official censors.

I’m sure it’s true that they don’t get all of it, particularly if it’s negative toward China. You don’t read much about Sudan here, though the controversy isn’t entirely ignored.

But one thing I’ve learned in the short time I’ve been here is that the Chinese media are sly about finding ways around the censors, so newspaper and Internet readers here aren’t in the dark quite as much as we have been led to believe.

Admittedly, I’m getting this impression from reading the China Daily, an English-language paper. But foreign correspondents who are posted here say the Chinese-language papers use similar tricks.

For example, there is still a story getting a lot of play internationally about the Chinese women’s gymnastics team using underage athletes.

I read all about that in the United States in papers such as the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and USA Today before leaving Los Angeles.

But it isn’t like the story has gone unreported in China. In fact, much of the information in the U.S. newspapers came from seemingly benign profiles about the gymnasts over the last couple of years in the Chinese media. (The Associated Press reported a new one Friday; the Xinhua News Agency identifying gymnast He Kexin as 13 last year, too young for international competition. When Xinhua was contacted later Friday, the agency stood by its story.)

As for the allegations, they were in the China Daily the morning after the Chinese women beat the United States in the team competition. It’s just the denials by Chinese officials and gymnasts were given more credibility than the allegations.

Reporters here do what they have to do.

The Chinese media at least have an excuse for not digging more into the allegations. I can’t say the same thing for the International Olympic Committee, which would like the issue to disappear.

‘There is no reason to believe that ages have been manipulated,’’ Arne Ljungqvist, the chairman of the IOC’s medical commission, said Friday.

-- Randy Harvey