Tian Bao

When the “iron rice bowl” meets the marathon: the Shuihua Zhang incident and the moralization of non-elite sports media spectacle

In 2025, an amateur marathon runner’s application for tiaoxiu (compensatory time-off) to compete in a race sparked a controversy that unfolded across multiple phases on Chinese social media. Drawing on media spectacle theory, this study employs a mixed method combining Latent Dir...