‘I just want some peace’: China’s Olympians besieged by hordes of megafans

Fans all over the world celebrated and cheered their favourite sporting heroes at the Paris Olympics. In China, they went further.
They mobbed medal-winners’ homes. They booed their opponents and raised middle fingers at them — even when the opponents were also Chinese. They threatened them online and when they had had enough of that, they threatened rival fans instead.
Now police have taken action. At least five fans have been arrested for aggressive posts online, and the public security ministry has issued warnings that “fanquan culture”, as it is known, will not be allowed to get out of hand.
Sports authorities have followed suit after athletes themselves began complaining of harassment. Pan Zhanle, the 20-year-old swimming sensation who smashed the world record when winning the 100m freestyle, unilaterally disbanded his official fan club last week complaining its members would not leave him alone
“I want to keep a low profile and get some peace and quiet,” he told Chinese media. “I’d rather not have as much success if it meant I could continue training hard with peace of mind.”
The emergence of fanquan culture — the world is an Anglo-Chinese mix of “fan” and “circles” — caught the authorities by surprise two decades ago. An early marker came in 2003 when David Beckham visited for an exhibition match with Real Madrid, which he had just joined, and hordes of teenage girls gathered outside his Beijing hotel.
The hotel auctioned off his bedsheets and towels and even a night in the same room for charity.
Fans, often but not always women, some middle-aged, now follow stars in sports at which China excels such as table tennis and diving with the fervour saved in the West for Taylor Swift. Pan’s account on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, added a million followers within five days of his gold medal.
The strangest manifestation of fanquan, however, has been the express preference of supporters for one Chinese superstar over another.
The star women divers Quan Hongchan and Chen Yuxi are said to be close friends as well as team-mates, competing together to win gold in the synchronised 10m diving as well as winning gold and silver respectively in the singles event.
However, when Chen, 18, beat Quan, 17, in the national finals last autumn Chen was subject to a torrent of abuse for having “stolen” the younger diver’s gold medal. The authorities at the time issued an appeal for calm.
Quan has an appealing rags-to-riches backstory, having been born in a village in southern China, and has described how she was motivated by the desire to pay medical bills for her mother, who was hit by a car in 2017.
Now her mother says she is not allowing Quan to come home to celebrate her Paris gold because the village has been inundated with visitors, with thousands of people thronging to see her birthplace every day.
The most extreme case of fan-on-fan rivalry focused on Quan and Chen’s table tennis equivalents, Chen Meng and Sun Yingsha. Chen defeated Sun for gold in Tokyo in 2021, continuing China’s decades-long dominance of the sport, and repeated the feat in Paris.
The latter victory came as a huge disappointment to Chinese fans, who had been rooting for the underdog, if Sun, the world No 1 and the Asian Games title-holder, can be described as an underdog.
Fans also seemed to believe that at the age of 30, Chen should have given way to Sun, who is 23. Sun’s appearance — she has a boyish face and cropped hair, fashionable among young Chinese girls — may also have been a factor.
Whatever the reason, the Chinese crowd in the Paris stadium unashamedly sided with her, going so far as booing when Chen won points. At Chen’s moment of victory, a Chinese fan was caught on camera raising a middle finger at her celebration.
“Although this is only an isolated phenomenon, its negative impact cannot be underestimated,” the People’s Daily intoned solemnly in an editorial. “It not only caused harm to athletes and seriously eroded the spirit of sports, but also misled the values of young people.”
The paper called fanquan “deformed” and vowed it would never be allowed to take root in Chinese culture — possibly a case of trying to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted.
It also noted that some fans had gone so far as to have “violated the law”. Weibo, the Chinese version of X, banned 300 users for “abusive content” after the Chen-Sun final. Attacks spread from Chen to her coaches, and even to apparently completely unfounded allegations of match-rigging. Weibo said it had “dealt with” 12,000 posts that broke China’s tight internet laws.
Chen also won some sympathy from users for her treatment by the fans. However, as Pan Zhanle found, even sympathy can show the extent of the problem. A week on, Pan’s announcement that he is disbanding his fan club has been viewed online 250 million times.