At a hotly contested professional soccer match in Beijing on Aug. 1, the crowd set aside rivalry in an apparently spontaneous act of mourning for the victims of the July 23 high-speed train crash in Wenzhou, China.
The match pitted the hometown Beijing Guoan, ranked second in the Chinese Football Association Super League—China’s top pro soccer league, against the number one ranked Guangzhou GAC.
The Guoan fans at Beijing Worker’s Stadium are known for their boisterous passion. They dress in the team’s green color and carry green placards, presenting a sea of green inside the stadium, and their loud cheering is amplified by frequent blasts from whistles and horns.
The Guoan home crowd is also notorious for being rude, taunting and insulting visiting teams with loud cheers.
At a match with the team that Guoan wants to overtake in the standings, the crowd showed a different temperament.
According to an Enorth Netnews report, after the playing of the national anthem, the over 10,000 fans on hand raised and pointed their index fingers to the sky in a silent act of remembrance for those killed in the Wenzhou high-speed train crash.
This was apparently the fans’ spontaneous action. No ceremony had been previously arranged, and the players were not wearing any black arm bands or ribbons or other signs of mourning.
This public act of mourning occurs within the context of widespread doubts about the regime’s response to the disaster.
The official death toll of 40 is widely disbelieved—some netizens claim the death toll must be in the hundreds, and the regime’s efforts to cover up the causes and extent of the disaster have been harshly criticized.
Seven days after the accident, on July 29, the Propaganda Department issued a gag order on reporting on the crash. Nonetheless, at least 12 newspapers defied the order and continued reporting on what happened, and commentary on microblogs has been scathing.
Once the game started, the Beijing fans were not as belligerent as usual. The match was played fiercely and ended in a 1-1 tie.
