{"id":41199,"date":"2022-01-30T19:00:18","date_gmt":"2022-01-30T10:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2022\/jan\/30\/sport-politics-and-covid-collide-at-the-beijing-winter-olympics"},"modified":"2022-01-30T19:00:18","modified_gmt":"2022-01-30T10:00:18","slug":"sport-politics-and-covid-collide-at-the-beijing-winter-olympics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=41199","title":{"rendered":"Sport, politics and Covid collide at the Beijing Winter Olympics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Games will open on Friday in a country that hopes sport will be the talking point. But political twists or a resurgent virus could leave the event skating on thin ice<\/p>\n<p>Hosting the Winter Olympics during a pandemic was always going to test the Chinese government, by putting its ever-growing ability to exercise political control and virus containment on a collision course with its enthusiasm for international prestige and status.<\/p>\n<p>The 2022 Winter Games, which open on Friday, are being held at a time of particularly intense western criticism of China over human rights abuses, from the mass persecution of Uyghurs in far western Xinjiang \u2013 labelled a genocide by the United States \u2013 and other groups including Tibetans, to the crushing of Hong Kong\u2019s freedoms.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2022\/jan\/30\/sport-politics-and-covid-collide-at-the-beijing-winter-olympics\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Games will open on Friday in a country that hopes sport will be the talking point. But political twists or a resurgent virus could leave the event skating on thin iceHosting the Winter Olympics during a pandemic was always going to test the Chinese&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[41,50,203,1716,2464,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific","category-china","category-sport","category-winter-olympics","category-winter-olympics-2022","category-world-news"],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41200,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41199\/revisions\/41200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}