In 2008, the Beijing Olympic Games opened in a spectacularly choreographed pageant of power: 15,000 drummers, dancers and acrobats filled the Bird’s Nest stadium with a dazzling array of rhythm, colour and, inevitably, stilt walking. Welcome, every extravagant moment insisted, to a country that does things bigger and better than anywhere else.
Twelve years on, it is not going to be like that. Tomorrow’s opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Games will be significantly less bombastic in scale and delivery. This time, there will be a fifth of the number of performers, a reflection, the organisers say, of the straightened, chastened, pandemic times. According to Zhang Yimou, the man who directed both the 2008 opening ceremony and the 2022 edition, the purpose this time is less about a show of strength and more to demonstrate China’s “willingness to pursue world peace”. The modest, reduced and downscaled ceremony will be designed, he added, to promote his nation’s “warm and legendary hospitality”.
For those who have arrived this week to take part in or report on the fortnight-long celebration of gliding, sliding and energetic sweeping of the ice in front of a curling stone, this will come as intriguing news. For them, there has been precious little evidence of warmth or hospitality. From the moment they arrived in the country, they have found themselves treated as if, in the words of a member of Team GB, “we are a dangerous bunch of alien invaders”.
Take the members of the Kazakhstan team who complained that so over-enthusiastic were the medics giving them Covid tests when they first arrived at Beijing airport, half of them suffered nose bleeds. “It felt like they tried to take out your brain,” one of the Kazakhs complained, after having a swab pushed so far up a nostril, it disappeared from view.
When seeking to characterise the Chinese approach to hosting the Winter Games in times of Covid, words such as ‘carefree’, ‘relaxed’ or ‘happy-go-lucky’ are not the first to spring to mind. For the athletes, the rule book is draconian. Before they even left home, for instance, every accredited visitor must have been fully vaccinated for at least a month and have undergone daily PCR tests for a week, conducted by approved Chinese government agencies, with the results logged in an official Olympic app.
Once they arrive in China, they are subject to daily testing, not in the form of the lateral flow home tests they are used to, but conducted by medics who appear to have learnt their technique in Guantanamo Bay. Anyone with Covid in their system (and the Chinese test is apparently so sensitive, it can pick up the merest trace of long dormant infection) will be placed immediately for 21 days in a government isolation facility. It’s not exactly the Ritz: photographs of lines of converted shipping containers have emerged from cities currently under enforced lockdown, like Anyang and Yuzhou.
