Sport

Skiing star Eileen Gu has announced that she will be an ambassador for Salt Lake City’s bid for the 2030 or 2034 Winter Olympics, sparking online debate in China. In today's increasingly polarised world, can a "globalised" person gain acceptance and recognition from conflicting parties and be that communicator of goodwill?

Translation studies professor Xiao Weiqing muses that the media and the Chinese Olympic Committee must have taken great pains to standardise and romanise Chinese names in their coverage of the Winter Olympics.

South Korean angst directed towards China during the Winter Olympics suggests that anti-China sentiment in South Korea has not completely subsided from the time of China's reprisals against South Korea for the THAAD missile system deployment some years ago. In such a climate, bilateral relations could get rockier if Yoon Seok-youl of the conservative People Power Party makes it to the finish line in South Korea's March presidential election.

Zaobao correspondent Yu Zeyuan feels that the Beijing Winter Olympics has turned out much better than what was initially expected. Despite diplomatic boycotts by some Western countries and political bickering about China's human rights issues, the Chinese are more than pleased with the event. Not only did China give its best-ever showing at a Winter Olympics, it also pulled off a decent event despite the pandemic, and has generated great interest in winter sports among the Chinese public.

Heng Kim Song has been the freelance editorial cartoonist

When the Chinese featured a lady wearing a hanbok — what to the Koreans is their national costume — at the Winter Olympics opening ceremony, it was as if the band-aid on rising China-South Korean tensions was peeled off. Soon after, cries of foul play and the Chinese “snatching” medals from the South Koreans followed. Are greater squabbles on the horizon for these Northeast Asian neighbours?

It seems that the Chinese and foreign media have very different approaches to covering the Beijing Winter Olympics — Chinese journalists want to portray the favourable side of the Games while foreign journalists tend to take a more critical stand in focusing on problems. Zaobao correspondent Yang Danxu examines this phenomenon.

The Beijing Winter Olympics has featured some naturalised China athletes, not least skier Eileen Gu and figure skater Zhu Yi, as well as the men’s and women’s ice hockey teams. These naturalised athletes have come under close scrutiny, and Zhu Yi’s poor performance in particular has come under fire. What makes for an effective naturalised athlete policy?

Yu Zeyuan takes stock of the barbs that have been traded by mainstream Western media and Chinese state media at the start of the Beijing Winter Olympics. It seems that references to political issues such as Xinjiang and Taiwan have been thrown in by both sides. After this snowball fight and the warm glow of the opening ceremony, is it time to get down to the sports?