When Chinese football fans turned on their TVs to watch World Cup matches from Qatar, there was a sense of disbelief over how tens of thousands of maskless fans were all packed together in stadiums while millions of Chinese compatriots at home are still confined to their homes as part of the government’s strict Zero COVID policy.
Once they started to realize that Qatar, like pretty much everywhere else, had long abandoned social distancing and mask protocols, furious Chinese netizens began to vent their anger on WeChat and other social media platforms, prompting an immediate response from state broadcast CCTV.
