Opinion | How will the Beijing 2022 Olympics differ from Tokyo 2020?
- China is out for a soft power win with the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, but will have to deal with Covid-19, boycott chatter and geopolitical tension
- Tokyo 2020 offered a playbook on how to host a Games in the pandemic landscape, but Beijing has more to worry about than their Japanese counterparts did
Beijing 2020 kicked off its torch lighting ceremony like any Olympics does, with a protest.
Protests are now the norm when it comes to the Olympics. Tokyo 2020 was interrupted at almost every point of its torch relay with Japanese protesters who didn’t want to see the Games go ahead due to a potential spike in cases and deaths related to Covid-19.
Tokyo did a good job hosting the Games, but its soft power win was muted as the pandemic did not ease and there was no tourism or international exposure boom from hundreds of thousands of overseas fans pumping money into the local economy. They got the win, but it was an ugly one.
China was surely taking notes, and now it has two playbooks to draw from. One on how to host one of the world’s largest sporting events during a pandemic, and another on how to handle protests, demonstrations and negative press. Given Tokyo 2020 was delayed a year, Beijing 2022 could have striking similarities to its Asian counterpart.