The Washington Post comments: "China's Olympic team has significantly underperformed in Rio, slipping behind Great Britain into third place with just 17 golds at the end of Day 11. It is shaping up to be China's worst Olympic performance since 1996. For a government that has long sought to bolster its prestige with Olympic success, that presents something of a challenge. State media, which began the Games in a buoyant mood, has spent the last week desperately downgrading expectations....China has long been known for a single-minded obsession with Olympic gold. Potential athletes are picked out at a young age and ruthlessly groomed for Olympic success, often in a sport of the authorities' choice. Nothing but first place was good enough for the media or the public, and Olympic success was seen as a potent symbol of a nation's rise — culminating of course in the grand spectacle of Beijing's 2008 Olympic Games, where it won a record 51 golds."

The New York Times reports: "For most of its 25 years, the Chinese history magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu has been loved by moderate liberals and detested with equal passion by devotees of Mao Zedong, who reviled it as a refuge for heretical criticisms of the Chinese leader and the Communist Party. But in a sign of how sharply ideological winds have turned under President Xi Jinping, officials who recently took control of the magazine have wooed Maoist and nationalist writers who long scorned the magazine. Several well-known hard-line polemicists attended a meeting with the new managers on Monday. The new masters of Yanhuang Chunqiu, which had been one of the few remaining outlets for liberal political opinion in China, appear likely to remake it into an avidly loyal defender of party orthodoxy, said Wu Wei, who has remained in place as executive editor of the magazine but is among those fighting to save its independence."