Lin Yuwei and Wu Yanni, China’s entrants in the women’s 100m hurdles final, embraced after the race at the Asian Games in Hangzhou.

Internet censorship in China, particularly of images, is often done on an ad-hoc basis with human monitors deciding which posts to restrict.

In 2017, Weibo, one of China’s biggest social media platforms with nearly 600 million monthly users, said it employed 1,000 “supervisors” to report on “pornographic, illegal and harmful” content.

That Wu had been allowed to run at all prompted concern that race officials were reluctant to disqualify one of China’s star athletes, regardless of sporting rules.

Mark Dreyer, a China-based sports analyst who was in the stadium for the event, wrote afterwards: “It just felt like the local officials needed to find a way to let Wu run”.

On Weibo, posts from ordinary netizens showing the greyed out squares of Wu and Lin’s “6/4” hug, the comments were more muted.

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