BEIJING: The year of 2022 Winter Olympics will be key for Chinese President Xi Jinping as he will aim to consolidate his position back home and project his power to the world.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent condemnation from the West, Xi got what he wanted the most at the beginning of the new year – showcasing the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
The Chinese president also hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin amid the ongoing tension with Ukraine. Before the end of this year, Xi would have scored a personal victory – a third, possibly unlimited, term as the country’s head and boss of the Chinese Communist Party, according to The Hong Kong post.
Despite several wins, Xi will have to admit the bitter fact that the Beijing Olympics was being boycotted by a group of advanced nations led by the United States, said the Hong Kong Post.
According to the report, even India’s decision to boycott the Games will rankle him after China allowed a PLA soldier involved in a skirmish with Indian soldiers in the June 2020 Galwan clashes as a torchbearer at the Games.
The report said that it will be long after the Games are over that the truth will come out, of how millions of ordinary Chinese citizens were put to months of misery and held in isolation so that Xi’s Olympic Bubble remains COVID-free during the period of the Games. According to the report, the world looks to how President Xi exploits the Games to further his power projection.
It is easy to narrow the choice down to what he may propose to do along with President Putin: strengthen the China-Russia axis at a time when Moscow and Washington are raising the stakes in a confrontation over the former’s designs on Ukraine.
On the escalation of tension over Ukraine, Xi has sympathized with Moscow and justified the latter’s concern over NATO trying to expand its footprint along Russia’s border. The two authoritarian regimes will use the Beijing Games as yet another opportunity to declare their growing closeness and their shared need to make secure the 4000-odd kilometer border between them. Their shared confrontations with the US only fuels their eagerness, The Hong Kong Post reported. (ANI)
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