In Beijing, Olympic Spectacle and Global Power Games
The New York Times
The opening of the Winter Games gave Xi Jinping and Vladimir V. Putin a chance to cement their partnership against Western censure.
BEIJING — China’s leader, Xi Jinping, opened an Olympic Games on Friday intended to celebrate his country’s increasingly assured global status standing defiantly with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, in an increasingly ideological contest with the United States and its allies.
While President Biden and other democratic leaders shunned the opening ceremony over China’s human rights abuses, Mr. Xi drew his own bloc of supportive guests. Mr. Putin, another strongman leader bristling against the United States’ demands, appeared with him in a calculated display of solidarity while Moscow’s tensions with Ukraine could tip into war.
The meeting with Mr. 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 rising power, but growing impatient, and disdainful, of Western censure.
