They discounted wholesale the votes of the Chinese fans.
It seems likely that the English language frontrunners that weren't prematurely culled by McCarty, were copy pasted over the Chinese nominations voted for by Chinese fans.
And the thing is, it's not even a "slate". It's a huge number of speculative fiction fans in China, reading Science Fiction World and getting excited about voting for a bunch of titles - both Chinese and English titles.
Add that to McCarty and the committee compiling sinister dossiers about authors to justify excluding their work from the ballot.
It's racism all the way through. And there's a fair amount of ugly responses by other white people going round too. A lot of white people insisting that this is because of holding Worldcon in China. Rather than it being the case that a bunch of other white people used "we have to engage in pre-emptive censorship and dossier-making in case we offend the CCP" as an excuse to censor whoever they liked. So you have the ridiculous situation where it's white people excluding Babel, their excuse being that it would be unacceptable in China, but Babel had already been translated and published in China! This is a debacle constructed by a group of white people in order to assert their gatekeeping privileges over the whole field.
I also blocked one white writer declaring that he thinks next year's Hugos will react by nominating and giving awards to "token" and "mediocre" writers of colour. Using this clusterfuck to pre-emptively line up a kick at any writers of colour who get a nomination or a win in Glasgow - some white people just want to find any excuse to discount POC. The problem is not that there aren't any deserving writers of colour to be found in any given year! It's that the Hugo Awards needs to be transparently run so that in any year it's possible to see the data and understand the process.
Imagine having to deal with that out of the blue?! Truly a cursed situation.
But then also:
Maybe they should have spent less time compiling dossiers about writers and more time researching sponsers instead. 🤦
