More Than 200,000 People Watched a Fake Table-Tennis Match on Chinese Livestreams
Livestream rooms on Chinese video platforms have been passing off spliced recordings of old table-tennis matches as live games — complete with fabricated scoreboards, an invented 30:28 finale and ads for face masks sold under a star player's name — while more than 200,000 viewers cheered along, unaware.
The scoreboard was the giveaway, once you knew to look. In one livestream room, an excited commentator was narrating a "live" duel between the Chinese star Wang Yidi and Japan's Harimoto Miwa: "Those backing Dadi, hit a 30, 30 in the chat!" The banner at the top read, in five large characters, "Go, Team China." Only a small line of text lower down admitted what was actually happening: a spliced replay of an old match. The fake game built to a final score of 30:28 — an impossible scoreline in real table tennis, where games end at 11 — with Wang prevailing, to the visible emotion of the studio host. Below the "match," product links.
These rooms have been multiplying across Chinese short-video platforms, presented as real-time broadcasts of national table-tennis matches. Reporters who checked found most were not live at all: old match audio stitched together, scoreboards invented outright. One Beijing Evening News count put the audience for a single fake broadcast at more than 200,000 people, many of them commenting "that was hard-fought" and "well played" in the belief they were watching history.
The economics are the point. Fake sports broadcasts harvest exactly what platforms reward: watch time, comments, likes. A fake national-team match is a reliable magnet — table tennis is China's most-followed sport, its players are household names, and a genuine Wang Yidi broadcast would draw a real crowd. Some rooms funnel that attention directly into sales: one account sold face masks under Wang Yidi's name without any connection to her. Lawyers quoted in Chinese coverage point out that the practice spans copyright infringement of match footage and consumer fraud against the buyers.
The episode lands amid a wider Chinese anxiety about what livestreaming has done to the information supply — fabricated "live" events, staged dramas and AI-generated clips have all drawn regulatory attention this year. What makes this version unusual is the audience. Nobody is being tricked out of large sums; they are being tricked out of an emotion, cheering for a victory that never happened, while the numbers on their screens tick up for someone else's benefit.