China’s pandemic Olympics begin, with lockdown and boycotts

The Olympics — and the opening ceremony — are always an exercise in performance for the host nation, a chance to showcase its culture, define its place in the world, flaunt its best side. That’s something China in particular has been consumed with for decades. But at this year’s Beijing Games, the gulf between performance and reality will be particularly jarring.

Fourteen years ago, a Beijing opening ceremony that featured massive pyrotechnic displays and thousands of card-flipping performers set a new standard of extravagance to start an Olympics that no host since has matched. It was a fitting start to an event often billed as China’s “coming out.”

Now, no matter how you view it, China has arrived — but the hope for a more open country that accompanied those first Games has faded.

For Beijing, these Olympics are a confirmation of its status as world player and power. But for many outside China, particularly in the West, they have become a confirmation of the country’s increasingly authoritarian turn.

As if to underline that transformation, the opening ceremony Friday was staged at the same stadium — known as the Bird’s Nest — that held the 2008 version. Back then, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei consulted on its construction. Now, he is one of the country’s best known dissidents and lives in exile.