Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic organizers chose two individuals, skiers Dinigeer Yilamujiang and Zhao Jiawen, to light the snowflake-shaped Olympic cauldron on Friday, formally launching the Games.
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The choice of Dinigeer is significant because, according to Chinese officials, Dinigeer is of Uyghur heritage and Zhao counts his heritage of the ruling Han party.
The Uyghur Musli/ms are an ethnic minority group in the far western region of Xinjiang, China, where the Chinese government has been accused of human rights violations. The United States and United Kingdom have accused the Chinese government of genocide against the Uyghurs.
This diplomatic battle spilled over into the world of sport, with many calling for boycotts of the Chinese-hosted Olympic Games over their treatment of the Uyghur ethnic minorities. Ultimately, there were no athlete boycotts of the event, but several governments, including the US, Canada, Australia, UK, Japan, and several European countries enacted diplomatic boycotts of the Beijing 2022 Games, choosing not to send any political delegations to the event.
Top U.S. officials didn’t attend the 2014 Olympics either because of Russia’s discriminatory policies against LGBTQ individuals.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki, herself a former collegiate swimmer, said in December that mass detention camps and a forced sterilization campaign against Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities were the drivers of the United States’ decision.
On Friday, as the opening ceremonies got underway in Beijing’s Olympic stadium dubbed “the Bird’s Nest,” first built for the 2008 Games, politicians from across the political spectrum and around the world spoke out against China’s treatment of ethnic minorities like the Uyghurs.
China has denied those claims, including a ban on BBC broadcasters last year over the UK government’s accusations.
Like all Olympic opening ceremonies, Friday’s was full of propaganda for the host nation – one of the major reasons for countries to continue bidding for Olympic Games, which are often money losers otherwise.
The apparent message of the Chinese government was a show that they do not discriminate against ethnic minorities, but in most of the world, they seem to have instead brought added attention to their actions in Xianjiang.
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei criticized the IOC and the Chinese government in an interview with CNN on Friday. Ai consulted on the construction of the Bird’s Nest stadium that hosted Friday’s ceremonies.
The IOC “never remained as a neutral position. They’re always standing next to the authoritarians, or business – business is the first target for them,” he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “Since the 2008 Olympics, they have been working with the government’s propaganda, and this time they’re even more. They are, you know, ignoring the top athletes’ from China’s safety and wellbeing, but rather to be part of a state of propaganda, which is, it’s pretty sad.”
The lighter of the Olympic cauldron is usually saved for someone extremely important in the home country. It is often a retired athlete, a star on the rise, or sometimes a non-athlete (though that has been rare in recent years). Most of the speculation centered around well-known Chinese Winter Olympians of the past, but instead it was two young and active athletes who were chosen.
Dinigeer, who started her career as a track & field athlete, is the first Chinese cross-country skiing medalist at any FIS-level event, while Zhao is a 21-year-old biathlete. Zhao competes in the Nordic combined event (which combine cross country and ski jumping).
Both are considered long shots to win medals.
The final legs as the torch approached the stadium included Olympic diver Ding Ning, who won gold at the 2016 Olympic Games and silver in 2012, former NBA star Yao Ming, and actor Jackie Chan.
Last summer at the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic Games, tennis player Naomi Osaka lit the torch.