New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Emboldened China opens Olympics with lockdown, boycotts
BEIJING — China, which used its first Olympics to amplify its international aspirations, invited the world back Friday — sort of — for the pandemic era’s second Games, this time as an emboldened and more powerful nation whose government’s authoritarian turn provoked some countries’ leaders into staying home.
Chinese President Xi Jinping declared the Games open during a ceremony heavy on ice-blue tones and winter imagery, held in the same lattice-encased Bird’s Nest stadium that hosted the inaugural event of the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Athletes Zhao Jiawen and Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a member of the country’s Uyghur Muslim minority, delivered the final Olympic flame. The choice of Yilamujiang was steeped in symbolism: Critics say the Beijing government has abused and oppressed Uyghurs on a massive scale.
With the flame lit, Beijing became the first city to host both winter and summer Games. And while some are staying away from the second pandemic Olympics in six months, many other world leaders attended the opening ceremony. Most notable: Russian President Vladimir Putin, who met privately with Xi earlier in the day as a dangerous standoff unfolded at Russia’s border with Ukraine.
International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach addressed assembled athletes: “Dear fellow Olympians: Your Olympic stage is set.”
The pandemic also weighs heavily on this year’s Games, just as it did last summer in Tokyo.
More than two years after the first COVID-19 cases were identified in China’s Hubei province, some 700 miles (1,100 km) south of Beijing, nearly 6 million human beings have died and hundreds of millions more around the world have been sickened.
The host country itself claims some of the lowest rates of death and illness from the virus, in part because of strict lockdowns imposed by the government aimed at quickly stamping out outbreaks. Such measures instantly greeted anyone arriving to compete in or attend the Winter Games.
An Olympic opening ceremony typically provides the host nation a chance to showcase its culture, define its place in the world, flaunt its best side. That’s something China in particular has been consumed with for decades. But at this year’s Beijing Games, the gulf between performance and reality is shaping up to be particularly jarring.
Fourteen years ago, a Beijing opening ceremony that featured massive pyrotechnic displays and thousands of card-flipping performers set a new standard of extravagance to start an Olympics that no host since has matched. It was a fitting start to an event often billed as China’s “coming out.”
Now, no matter how you view it, China has arrived — but the hope for a more open country that accompanied those first Games has faded.
For Beijing, these Olympics are a confirmation of its status as world player and power. Yet for many outside China, particularly in the West, they have become a confirmation of the country’s embrace of more oppressive policies.
Chinese authorities are crushing pro-democracy activism and tightening their control over Hong Kong, becoming more confrontational with Taiwan, and interning Uyghurs in the far west — a crackdown the U.S. government and others have called genocide.
In protest of those actions, leaders of the United States, Britain, Australia and Canada, among others, imposed a diplomatic boycott on these Games, shunning appearances alongside Chinese leadership while still allowing their athletes to compete. But China came back with its own symbolic finger in the eye Friday, putting Yilamujiang in the opening night’s most anticipated role.