Chinese President Xi Jinping has opened a Beijing Winter Olympics that not only bear the mark of the global pandemic but are also mixing sport and global politics as few others have since the era of the Cold War.
The scintillating opening ceremony ended with a member of China's Uighur minority - whose treatment is the focus of international human rights criticism - helping to light the Olympic cauldron, hours after Mr Xi announced a new strategic alliance with visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Three thousand performers took to a stage comprising 11,600 square metres of high-definition LED screens in the famed Bird's Nest stadium before a crowd thinned out by COVID-19 restrictions.
The lighting of the stadium cauldron by the last athlete in the torch relay, their identity kept secret until the last moment, usually provides the climax at the end of the Olympic opening ceremony, and this one proved especially significant.
Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a 20-year-old cross-country skier born in Altay in the western Xinjiang region, lit the flame along with Nordic combined athlete Zhao Jiawen.
Dinigeer Yilamujiang from Xinjiang was among the torchbearers. Source: YNA
China's treatment of the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang - which the US deems genocide - was the trigger for a diplomatic boycott by several Western countries including the United States.
China rejects allegations of human rights abuses and sought to convey a spirit of inclusion during the ceremony, in which the Chinese flag was passed among 56 people representing its ethnic groups before being raised for the national anthem.
The ceremony was staged by movie director Zhang Yimou, reprising his role from Beijing's 2008 Summer Games triumph.
But, as in Japan half a year ago, the COVID-19 pandemic imposed severe constraints, not least by paring down the number of visitors able to see the spectacle in person.
With China still sticking to a "zero Covid" policy despite the Omicron variant spreading fast across the globe, organisers decided last month not to sell tickets to the public, kept outside a "closed loop" of competitors and other personnel.
Though smaller in scale than the 2008 Games - dubbed China's "coming out party" - the Beijing Winter Olympics are being staged by a China that is much more prosperous, powerful, confident and confrontational under Mr Xi.
Hours before they began, Mr Xi and Mr Putin unveiled their alliance, proclaiming a "no limits" friendship between their countries.
It was a stark reminder of a backdrop of geopolitical rivalry unseen since the tit-for-tat Cold War boycotts of the 1980s, when the United States refused to attend the Olympics in Moscow and the Soviet Union stayed away from Los Angeles.
Vladimir Putin met his Chinese counterpart before the Opening Ceremony. Source: Pool Getty Images
With tensions on both sides of the Eurasian landmass at their highest for decades, Mr Putin and Mr Xi publicly took each other's sides over a range of grievances, most notably Ukraine, where the West accuses Mr Putin of preparing for war.
The Russian leader - who hosted his own Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014, days before sending troops to seize Ukraine's Crimean peninsula - thanked Mr Xi for inviting him, adding: "We know first-hand that this is a huge job."
In a joint Russian-Chinese statement, Beijing backed Russia's longstanding call for NATO to halt its expansion - Moscow's central demand in a dispute with Western countries that say they believe Mr Putin is preparing for war in Ukraine.
Russia, which has deployed more than 100,000 troops to the Ukrainian frontier, denies planning to invade but says it could take unspecified military action unless its security demands are met.
Moscow, for its part, said it fully supported Beijing's stance on Taiwan and opposed Taiwanese independence in any form.
International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach urged the world's political leaders to observe an "Olympic truce" and "give peace a chance".
But political leaders from the United States and other Western countries were absent, having cited persecution of the Uighurs and other Muslim minorities, which Beijing denies.
Rights groups accuse China of torture, forced labour and detention of a million people in internment camps in Xinjiang.
China calls them re-education and training facilities, says it is fighting religious extremism, and denies abuses.
"By selecting a Uighur athlete to light the torch, China is trying to address criticism by the West about genocide or persecution of the Uighurs, and about sinocisation of ethnic minorities," said Ma Haiyun, an expert on Xinjiang and an associate professor at Frostburg State University in Maryland.
"But I don't think this can have much effect on the West, which tends to think most of what China puts up is a show anyway."
