China blocks news after deadly attack that killed 35 people

At least 35 people were killed and dozens injured when a man rammed his car into pedestrians exercising around a sports center in the southern Chinese city of Zhuhai on Monday evening.

Images of bodies lying on the sidewalk appeared on social media in the hours after the crash but were gone by early Tuesday morning, with local police reporting only “injured people.”

It took officials nearly 24 hours to reveal that dozens had been killed — in one of the country’s deadliest incidents in years.

Photo: AFP

China heavily monitors social media platforms, with common practice removing words and topics deemed sensitive – sometimes within minutes.

Videos and photos of the bloody moments following the incident were quickly deleted on a social media site late Monday night.

Videos of the aftermath posted on Xiaohongshu (小紅書), the Chinese equivalent of Instagram, were also removed.

Chinese officials did not announce dozens of deaths until nearly 24 hours after the attack, while state media reported the 35 deaths shortly after 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday.

Shortly afterwards, the hashtag ‘Man in Zhuhai rammed the crowd, causing 35 deaths’ rose to the No. 1 trending topic on social media and was viewed 69 million times within an hour.

The fatal crash occurred on the eve of China’s largest air show, held in the same city, a showpiece promoted for weeks by the country’s tightly controlled state media.

State media in China also act as government mouthpieces.

The state-backed one Global times Yesterday morning the newspaper published a short story on page 3 about the “car ram case” – a stark contrast to the front page article about fighter jets at the nearby air show.

That of the Chinese Communist Party Volksdagblad contained Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) instructions to treat injured residents and punish the perpetrator in a short block of text on the front page.

State broadcaster China Central Television’s evening news program,

Agence France-Presse reporters on the scene in Zhuhai late Tuesday night saw delivery workers placing online orders for bouquets of flowers next to flickering candles to commemorate the victims.

However, just a few hours later, cleanup crews cleared the monument, with some saying they were acting on “orders from above.”

A handful of people at the site were prevented from taking videos by a police car and security guards shouted: “No filming.”

China has a long history of restricting the spread of information, sometimes leading to costly delays in the response.