Although China has tried to publicly distance itself from Russia's invasion of Ukraine without criticizing President Vladimir Putin, observers on the Chinese mainland have noticed in recent days that their country's state-run news media juggernaut -- like the government itself -- appears to be subtly shifting its tone on the war.
There is slightly less focus on Russia's military might, observers say, and slightly more on peace talks and the civilian toll of Russian strikes. Russian state propaganda has also fallen in popularity on Weibo, a tightly censored Chinese social media network.
On Thursday, the only top-trending Weibo item about the war was a speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the U.S. Congress.
Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said in an interview Friday that he had observed in recent days subtle shifts in Chinese official discourse about Ukraine.
"That's based on a shift in public opinion" on the Chinese mainland, Shi said.
In the early days of the war, coverage on "Xinwenlianbo," an evening news program of state-run broadcaster CCTV, mainly emphasized the dominance of the Russian military and its operation in Ukraine. This week, however, there has been more footage of Zelenskyy and more direct mention of Russian attacks.
A similar shift has been evident in coverage by CGTN America, the global arm of China's state broadcaster.
"The dead bodies of people killed by Russian shelling lay covered across much of Ukraine," CGTN America said Friday on Twitter. "With the number of people fleeing the conflict growing to the millions and Russian shelling continuing, many fear the humanitarian disaster is far from over."
Such posts may not indicate a shift in Chinese foreign policy.
"What China sympathizes with is not Ukraine as a sovereign nation, but with the Ukrainian people," Shi said.
Even as Russian forces have turned to shelling towns and cities, Chinese officials have blamed the United States for the war and echoed Putin in criticizing NATO. Chinese diplomats and state media organizations have also amplified Kremlin propaganda and a conspiracy theory about Pentagon-funded bioweapons labs in Ukraine.
As the news media in Europe and North America covered a Russian attack on a theater this week in the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, a Chinese state broadcaster carried a report Friday about what it said was a Ukrainian missile attack in Donetsk, a Russia-backed separatist region of Ukraine.
Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, told reporters that the government had been "deeply grieved by the increasing number of civilian casualties and refugees reported by the media."
"The top priority for all parties is to stop the fighting, uphold restraint, ensure the safety and basic humanitarian needs of civilians and prevent a larger scale of humanitarian crisis," Zhao said at a regular news briefing in Beijing.