BEIJING — China’s leader
Xi Jinping opened an Olympic Games on
Friday intended to celebrate his country’s increasingly assured global status
while standing defiantly with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in an
increasingly ideological contest with the United States and its allies.
اضافة اعلان
While President Joe Biden and other democratic leaders shunned
the opening ceremony over China’s human rights abuses, Xi drew his own bloc of
supportive guests. Putin, another strongman bristling against U.S. demands,
appeared with him earlier in a calculated display of solidarity as Moscow’s
tensions with Ukraine could tip into war.
The meeting with Putin, with the opening ceremony, amounted to a
choreographed display of China’s shifting place in the world — wanting to win
over countries wary of its growing power, but increasingly impatient, and
disdainful, of Western censure.
It also underscored China and Russia’s determination to present
a united front against the West, broadly, and the United States in particular —
exactly the result that President Richard Nixon and his national security
adviser, Henry Kissinger, were trying to avoid with their opening to China in
1971.
In a joint statement after the two leaders met, they said their
friendship had “no limits,” and China sided with Russia on one of its critical
security demands: an end to NATO expansion to the east and closer to Russia’s
borders.
The two leaders called for the United States to abandon plans to
deploy intermediate range missiles in Europe and Asia and denounced what they
see as U.S. interference in their internal affairs by fomenting “color
revolutions” calling for greater democracy.
“Russia and China stand against attempts by external forces to
undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions,” they said
in the 5,300-word statement, which illustrated the widening rift between
democracies and autocracies.
In a message directly aimed at the United States, the two
leaders vowed “to counter interference by outside forces in the internal
affairs of sovereign countries under any pretext, oppose color revolutions and
will increase cooperation in the aforementioned areas.”
The statement made no mention of mutual support in Russia’s
tensions over Ukraine and China’s with Taiwan, signaling the limits of the
growing partnership.
“This statement reflects the nature of the relationship with
China,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
“It’s increasingly deep, increasingly directed at the U.S., but it’s not an
alliance where both sides support each other on everything.”
After the hard-nosed geopolitics of his talks with Putin, Xi
presided over the Winter Games’ opening spectacular in the National Stadium,
known as the Bird’s Nest. The ceremony, lasting more than two hours on a clear,
frigid night, was filled with images of China as a friendly, open host, despite
the imposition of the most stringent health restrictions ever in a major
sporting event.
The night began with a display of folksy charm watched by
spectators carefully screened against COVID-19 — a distant cry from the
passionate crowd that filled the stadium for the grandiose, four-hour Summer
Olympics ceremony there in 2008. The highlight for many that time was the
appearance of 2,008 tightly coordinated drummers chanting Confucius: “Friends
have come from afar, and how happy we are.”
This time, a thousand performers jumped and twisted to China’s
version of square dancing, a boisterous dance style popular among middle-aged
people who gather in parks across China. Zhang Yimou, the director of the
opening ceremony, as well as the 2008 opening, has said that this time he
wanted to highlight China’s “ordinary humanity.”
The president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas
Bach, used his remarks at the opening ceremony to make a plea to keep politics
out of international sports, a position that has drawn increasing criticism
from detractors of the committee and of China.
Politics, in fact, have been an undercurrent of these Games from
the beginning.
Xi has seized on the occasion to present China as an anchor of
stability in a crisis-ridden world. Being able to hold the Games on schedule,
in the face of the pandemic, is enough proof of China’s dependability, he has
suggested.
Nearly 14 years after the 2008 Games, a very different China —
much wealthier, more powerful, but also more feared — put on a show designed to
reassure, as well as dazzle, its global audience. China, the message was, did
not feel the same swaggering anxiety as it once did to prove that it had
arrived.
“China is no longer seeking entry into the international
community. It is an embedded senior member,” Rana Mitter, a professor of
Chinese history and politics at Oxford University, said of the contrast between
2008 and today.
“There is also a much stronger message saying, ‘We’re no longer
supplicants seeking to enter the room. We are defining the rules of what
happens in the room’,” he said.
Xi and other Chinese leaders have portrayed the Games as a
celebration of sport, accusing the United States of politicizing the event by
leading a “diplomatic boycott” by Western leaders and senior officials.
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