With spirit of inclusion, China opens Winter Olympics

The Beijing Winter Games opened on Friday night in a snow- and ice themed ceremony at the Bird’s Nest stadium that concluded with the cauldron lit by two young Chinese Olympians, one of them a member of China’s Uyghur minority.

During a performance that went longer than scheduled on a frigid night in the Chinese capital, President Xi Jinping declared the opening of an Olympics whose preparations were beset by the pandemic in China.

Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a 20-year-old cross-country skiier born in Altay in the western Xinjiang region, lit the cauldron along with Zhao Jiawen, 21, who competes in Nordic combined, finishing a torch relay whose final runners were Chinese Olympians from recent decades.

China sought to convey a spirit of inclusion during Friday night’s ceremony, in which the Chinese flag was passed among 56 people representing its different ethnic groups before it was raised for the national anthem.

Snow and ice

The ceremony in a partially-filled Bird’s Nest stadium – the scene of Beijing’s triumphant 2008 Summer Games launch – was filled with imagery of ice and snow, with Xi’s declaration followed by red-suited “skaters” sliding across virtual ice.

They were accompanied by a version of the John Lennon song “Imagine”, which has become a fixture at Olympics ceremonies.

Held on the first day of Spring by the Chinese calendar, the ceremony began with a performance by dancers waving glowing green stalks to convey the vitality of the season, followed by an explosion of white and green fireworks that spelled the word “Spring”.

The traditional “parade of nations”, featured each of the 91 delegations preceded by a women, carrying a placard in the shape of a snowflake resembling a Chinese knot.

In keeping with Olympic tradition, the parade was led into the stadium by Greece with the rest ordered by stroke number in the first character of their Chinese name, which meant Turkey was second, followed by Malta, with host China going last and drawing roars from the stadium crowd.

The entrances for “Hong Kong, China”, as well as for Russia and Pakistan, also generated applause. Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, the highest profile foreign leaders present for the Games, could be seen in the stadium.

Prime Minister Imran Khan and his delegation arose from their seats to join the spectators for welcoming Pakistan’s squad passing through the venue waving the National Flag. However, the athletes from Russia, unable to carry their flag due to doping violations, marching instead under the standard of the Russian Olympic Committee.

Return to Bird’s Nest

Directed by Zhang Yimou, reprising his role from Beijing’s 2008 Summer Games triumph, the event featured 3,000 performers – most of them children and teenagers – on a stage comprised of 11,600 square metres of high-definition LED screen resembling an ice surface.

All of the performers were ordinary people from Beijing and nearby Hebei province, with “the Story of a Snowflake” its central thread. With temperatures of about -4C at the start – not enough to daunt the shirtless flagbearer from American Samoa – the show lasted two hours and 20 minutes, longer than scheduled.

The crowd itself was pared down, with organisers deciding last month not to sell tickets to Olympic events to curtail the spread of Covid-19. A “closed-loop” separates competitors and other personnel from the Chinese public throughout the Olympics.

More confident China

Though smaller in scale than the Summer Games – dubbed China’s “coming out party” in 2008 – the Beijing Winter Olympics are being staged by a much more prosperous, powerful and confident China under President Xi.

China’s hosting of the Winter Games has drawn criticism, and countries including the United States, Britain and Australia staged diplomatic boycotts, meaning they did not send government representatives to the Games.

Putin arrived on Friday, a day after Prime Minister Imran Khan landed in the country for meetings with Xi. The official start of the Games will come as a relief to organisers navigating the extreme complexity of staging them during a pandemic while adhering to China’s zero-Covid policy.