" loading="" class="lazyload size-article_feature" data-sizes="auto" data-src="" src="https://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/opening4.jpeg?w=525"/>
Chinese language President Xi Jinping waves throughout the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics, Friday, Feb. 4, 2022, in Beijing. (AP Picture/Jae C. Hong)
By SARAH DiLORENZO | The Related Press
BEIJING — China, which used its first Olympics to amplify its worldwide aspirations, invited the world again Friday — type of — for the pandemic period’s second Video games, this time as an emboldened and extra highly effective nation whose authorities’s authoritarian flip provoked some nations’ leaders into staying residence.
Chinese language President Xi Jinping declared the Video games open throughout a ceremony heavy on ice-blue tones and winter imagery, held in the identical lattice-encased Chicken’s Nest stadium that hosted the inaugural occasion of the 2008 Summer season Olympics.
Athletes Zhao Jiawen and Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a member of the nation’s Uyghur Muslim minority, delivered the ultimate Olympic flame. The selection of Yilamujiang was steeped in symbolism: Critics say the Beijing authorities has abused and oppressed Uyghurs on an enormous scale.
With the flame lit, Beijing turned the primary metropolis to host each winter and summer season Video games. And whereas some are staying away from the second pandemic Olympics in six months, many different world leaders attended the opening ceremony. Most notable: Russian President Vladimir Putin, who met privately with Xi earlier within the day as a harmful standoff unfolded at Russia’s border with Ukraine.
Worldwide Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach addressed assembled athletes: “Expensive fellow Olympians: Your Olympic stage is ready.”
The pandemic additionally weighs closely on this 12 months’s Video games, simply because it did final summer season in Tokyo. Greater than two years after the primary COVID-19 circumstances had been recognized in China’s Hubei province, some 700 miles south of Beijing, practically 6 million human beings have died and lots of of thousands and thousands extra all over the world have been sickened.
The host nation itself claims a number of the lowest charges of dying and sickness from the virus, partially due to strict lockdowns imposed by the federal government aimed toward shortly stamping out outbreaks. Such measures immediately greeted anybody arriving to compete in or attend the Winter Video games.
An Olympic opening ceremony sometimes supplies the host nation an opportunity to showcase its tradition, outline its place on this planet, flaunt its greatest facet. That’s one thing China specifically has been consumed with for many years. However at this 12 months’s Beijing Video games, the gulf between efficiency and actuality is shaping as much as be notably jarring.
Fourteen years in the past, a Beijing opening ceremony that featured huge pyrotechnic shows and hundreds of card-flipping performers set a brand new customary of extravagance to begin an Olympics that no host since has matched. It was a becoming begin to an occasion typically billed as China’s “popping out.”
Now, regardless of the way you view it, China has arrived — however the hope for a extra open nation that accompanied these first Video games has light.
Chinese language authorities are crushing pro-democracy activism and tightening their management over Hong Kong, turning into extra confrontational with Taiwan, and interning Uyghurs within the far west — a crackdown the U.S. authorities and others have known as genocide.
In protest of these actions, leaders of the USA, Britain, Australia and Canada, amongst others, imposed a diplomatic boycott on these Video games, shunning appearances alongside Chinese language management whereas nonetheless permitting their athletes to compete. However China got here again with its personal symbolic finger within the eye Friday, placing Yilamujiang within the opening night time’s most anticipated position.
Within the runup to the Olympics, China’s suppression of dissent was additionally on show within the controversy surrounding Chinese language tennis star Peng Shuai. She disappeared from public view final 12 months after accusing a former Communist Social gathering official of sexual assault. Her accusation was shortly scrubbed from the web, and dialogue of it stays closely censored.
Within the shadow of these political points, China placed on its present. As Xi took his seat, the performers turned towards him and repeatedly bowed. A simultaneous cheer went up as they raised their pom poms towards their president — China’s strongest chief since Mao Zedong, who established the Folks’s Republic in 1949.
A line of individuals wearing costumes representing China’s various ethnicities handed the nationwide flag to the pole the place it was raised — a present of unity the nation typically places on as a part of its narrative that its big selection of ethnic teams reside collectively in peace and prosperity.
However politics nonetheless elbowed its manner into the proceedings. The parade of athletes from Taiwan — the island democracy that China says belongs to it however that competes individually as “Chinese language Taipei” — was greeted with a cheer from the group, as had been the Russian rivals. An overcoated Putin stood and waved on the delegation, nodding crisply as they marched.
As with all Olympics, consideration will shift Saturday — not less than partially — from the geopolitical problems with the day to the athletes themselves.
All eyes flip now as to if Alpine snowboarding celebrity Mikaela Shiffrin, who already owns three Olympic medals, can exceed sky-high expectations. How snowboard sensation Shaun White will cap off his Olympic profession — and if the game’s present standard-bearer, Chloe Kim, will wow us once more. And whether or not Russia’s ladies will sweep the medals in determine skating.
And China is pinning its hopes on Eileen Gu, the 18-year-old, San Francisco-born freestyle skier who has chosen to compete for her mom’s native nation and will win three gold medals.
As they compete, the situations imposed by Chinese language authorities provide a stark distinction to the social gathering ambiance of the 2008 Video games. Some flight attendants, immigration officers and lodge employees have been coated head to toe in hazmat gear, masks and goggles. There's a each day testing routine for all attendees, adopted by prolonged quarantines for all these testing constructive. And there's no passing from the Olympic venues by means of the ever-present cordons of chain-link fence — coated in cheery messages of a “shared future collectively” — into town itself.
China has additionally remodeled within the years since its first Video games. Then, it was an rising world financial pressure making its greatest leap but onto the worldwide stage. Now it's a burgeoning superpower. Xi, who was the top of the 2008 Olympics, now runs the complete nation and has inspired a personality-driven marketing campaign of adulation.
Three a long time after its troops crushed huge democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Sq., killing lots of and maybe hundreds of Chinese language, the federal government locked up an estimated 1 million members of minority teams, principally Uyghurs, in mass internment camps. The state of affairs has led human rights teams to dub these the “Genocide Video games.”
China says the camps are “vocational coaching and schooling facilities” which are a part of an anti-terror marketing campaign and have closed. It denies any human rights violations.