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…

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How did Evil Unbound (731), one of the most anticipated Chinese war movies of 2025, go from patriotic hype to online backlash? A deep dive into the official narrative, the audience reception, and everything that’s particular about this movie.
 

731 and 918, those were the numbers dominating Chinese social media over the past week. Both numbers carry heavy historical weight, but the recent discussions surrounding them reveal two parallel worlds of the official narrative vs the audience experience of a controversial new World War II film.

It was “9.18” on Thursday, when China commemorated the 94th anniversary of the September 18th Incident (九一八事变). On that day in 1931, a small explosion on a Japanese-owned railway near Shenyang (Mukden) was used as a pretext to invade Manchuria.

While many older Chinese were taught in school that the war began in 1937, recent state-led campaigns increasingly emphasize 1931 as the true beginning of China’s “14-year-long war” (1931–1945). Over the past decade, the 918 commemorations have become more prominent online, shaping public memory through nationalistic messaging.

This year, the commemoration had an extra dimension, as it wove the release of Evil Unbound (English title), also known as 731, into the patriotic media narratives around 918.

Patriotic film poster putting 918 and 731 together.

The much-anticipated war movie 731depicts the atrocities of Japan’s Unit 731 (731部队), notorious for conducting horrific biological warfare experiments in Harbin during World War II under Major General Shiro Ishii (石井四郎), a former army surgeon and biologist with a particular interest in historical plagues. Under his command, Japan’s biological warfare and human experimentation in China were carried out on a larger scale than anywhere…