By TAKASHI FUNAKOSHI/ Correspondent
July 6, 2021 at 16:18 JST
BEIJING--China will only be sending a vice premier to the Opening Ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics scheduled for July 23, according to a Chinese Communist Party source.
Sun Chunlan, a vice premier in charge of sports policy, will represent the Chinese government at the Opening Ceremony.
She is one of the 25 members of the Politburo, the highest decision-making organ in the Communist Party. But her ranking pales in comparison to Chinese President Xi Jinping, who attended the Opening Ceremony for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia.
With Beijing scheduled to host the next Winter Olympics in 2022, government officials at one time hoped for greater bilateral cooperation through the Olympics.
But strained diplomatic relations along with concerns over the novel coronavirus situation in Japan likely led to Beijing’s decision to only dispatch a vice premier.
In June, Sun inspected preparations by athletes and the health management team to be sent to Tokyo. She instructed them to make every effort to minimize the effects that infection-prevention measures might have on the competition.
China has no set protocol on who it sends for Opening Ceremonies to the Olympics.
For the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, Liu Yandong, the then vice premier in charge of sports policy, represented the Chinese government.
When bilateral ties were somewhat better between 2017 and 2019, the leaders of the two nations expressed support for the other in hosting the Olympics.
But in addition to the controversy over the disputed Senkaku Islands, claimed by both Japan and China, the novel coronavirus pandemic has sharply reduced the opportunities for direct meetings between the leaders of the two nations. That has weakened calls for cooperation through the Olympics.
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