REUTERS
October 20, 2021 at 14:20 JST
Protesters raise a Tibetan flag and a banner from scaffolding at the Acropolis hill, in Athens, Greece, Oct. 18. (AP Photo)
BEIJING--China lit its Olympic flame in Beijing on Wednesday after the ceremonial torch arrived from Athens, ahead of the Chinese capital’s hosting of the 2022 Winter Games in February.
The Winter Games will be held from Feb. 4 to Feb. 20, when Beijing will become the first city to host both the summer and winter Olympics, amid a COVID-19 pandemic that means overseas spectators will be excluded.
At a welcome ceremony held near the National Stadium, shaped like a bird’s nest and built for the 2008 Summer Games, Beijing Communist Party chief Cai Qi lit a cauldron to symbolize the arrival of the Olympic flame in China.
The flame had left Athens on Oct. 19 and travelled to Beijing in a red lantern designed in the likeness of a Han Dynasty tomb artefact, carried by torchbearers decked in white.
China will display the Olympic flame at Beijing’s Olympic Park from Wednesday. In early February next year, 1,200 torchbearers will carry the flame through the three cities of Beijing, Yanqing and Zhangjiakou, which are the competition venues.
The torch relay route has been “appropriately reduced” due to the need to guard against the spread of COVID-19, said Beijing Vice Mayor Zhang Jiandong at the ceremony.
The ceremony went off without a hitch on Wednesday in Beijing, where, like elsewhere in China, security is usually tight.
At a ceremony in Athens on Oct. 18 to hand over the flame to China, three protesters unfurled a banner reading “No Genocide Games” and waved a Tibetan flag.
Rights groups have called for a boycott of the Beijing games to protest against what they termed as human rights atrocities in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. China has rejected those claims.
Greece’s Olympic Committee (HOC) said it was disappointed the Athens ceremony had been used for political purposes.
Here is a collection of first-hand accounts by “hibakusha” atomic bomb survivors.
A peek through the music industry’s curtain at the producers who harnessed social media to help their idols go global.
Cooking experts, chefs and others involved in the field of food introduce their special recipes intertwined with their paths in life.
A series based on diplomatic documents declassified by Japan’s Foreign Ministry
A series about Japanese-Americans and their memories of World War II