China’s defeat against Japan at the Asian Games trended on the same day as the commemoration of the Mukden Incident—not as a separate event, but as a painful reminder of the humiliation of war.
 

Football can be a useful way to gauge the state of nations.¹ So can basketball, apparently.

One of the most discussed topics on Chinese social media on September 18 was the China vs. Japan men’s basketball semifinal at the Asian Games, a topic that was collectively viewed not merely through a sports angle, but through the lens of history and WWII – especially on an important commemoration day that was all about China’s war against Japanese aggression.

September 18 marks the anniversary of the Mukden Incident in 1931. Right next to the basketball game, that topic became one of the top keywords on Weibo and other Chinese platforms on Friday.²

The Mukden Incident —a staged explosion that damaged a section of Japanese railway in Shenyang [Mukden] on September 18, 1931—was used as a pretext for Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and has come to be widely regarded by Chinese historians and officials as the true starting point of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

On this significant day, the China vs. Japan game in Nagoya ended in a major 77-97 loss for the Chinese team, which critics attributed to a lack of speed and tactical weaknesses that left them defenseless against the Japanese team’s swift attacks. Making it worse, the Chinese had the advantage of taller players, and the Japanese weren’t even playing with their best team.

“Like a top-grade horse losing to a bottom-grade horse,” one sports columnist wrote (“是我们的上等马输给了对方的下等马”).

Prior to the game, many commenters already questioned why a China-Japan face-off should take place on such a sensitive date, while others suggested that the Chinese team “could not afford to lose on this day.”

Posted by Weibo user 君见理5, this AI poster transforms…

Originally published as the Eye on Digital China newsletter on September 17, 2026.

In this edition:

• Guangzhou Library fills with young people “pretending to work”
• How “shuaqi-ism” became the buzzword of China’s new semester
• Why office workers are “going rural” at Starbucks
• The rise of China’s 24-hour fishbone clinics

It’s been a week full of noteworthy trends. What hasn’t been trending are any baseless rumors you might have encountered speculating about Xi Jinping’s health after he returned from New Delhi.

Although such speculation is common on Western social media platforms, posts about the Chinese leader that deviate from official media reports and state narratives are rarely available on mainland Chinese platforms due to censorship and monitoring. For the same reason, you’ll also see that news reports about Xi Jinping, from his visit to India to domestic messages, often have restricted comment sections, allowing only a select number of comments — or no comments at all.

At the same time, disseminating rumors or false information online is punishable by law in China. Due to the risk of serious legal consequences for posting rumors deemed damaging to the state or society, there is also self-censorship among Chinese netizens who wouldn’t want to risk reposting such content. This is why you see that X, along with other foreign platforms, is the main source of rumors about Xi’s supposed health issue at the BRICS Summit, not Chinese social media.

📌 On a separate but related note, it’s regrettable to see more English-language China-focused projects disappear. WIRED has discontinued Made in China, the newsletter created by Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis. At the same time, the podcast