Chinese dictator Xi Jinping paid a visit to the still-under-construction venues for the Beijing Winter Olympics on Tuesday, heedless of the massive coronavirus wave sweeping across China and forcing millions of ordinary citizens into brutally strict lockdowns.

Human rights activists have christened the Beijing Winter Games the “Genocide Olympics” due to China’s brutal oppression of the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang province. Calls to cancel the Olympics have not been heeded so far, but the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada have declared a “diplomatic boycott” of the event by refusing to send officials as VIP guests. The Chinese Communist Party is ruthlessly using its economic leverage to keep corporate sponsors of the Olympics in line and stifle criticism of the atrocities in Xinjiang.

Exile Tibetans use the Olympic Rings as a prop as they hold a street protest against the holding of 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing in Dharmsala, India, Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021. Five effigies represent Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong, Inner Mongolia and the region ethnic Uighurs call ‘East Turkestan’, under Chinese control. (AP Photo/Ashwini Bhatia)

“Xi visited the National Speed Skating Oval, Main Media Center, Athletes’ Village, Games-time Operations Command Center and a winter sports training base, learning about Games preparatory work as well as Chinese athletes’ preparations for the Games,” China’s state-run Xinhua news service reported.

The National Speed Skating Oval, also known as the ‘Ice Ribbon’, the venue for speed skating events at the 2022 Winter Olympics, is seen in Beijing on January 3, 2022, a month before the opening of the games on February 4, 2022. (Photo by GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images)

 

Reporters attend a media tour at the National Ski Jumping Centre, a venue for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games, in Zhangjiakou, China’s northern Hebei province on December 21, 2021. (Photo by WANG ZHAO/AFP via Getty Images)

“Xi also extended New Year greetings to athletes, coaches, volunteers and representatives of operation teams, media and scientific research staff,” Xinhua added.

Xinhua was amusingly meticulous about captioning every image from Xi’s photo op with all of his many titles – for example, “Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, visits a winter sports training base in Beijing, capital of China, Jan. 4, 2022. Xi inspected the preparations for the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Beijing on Tuesday.”

In reality, Xi is an unelected despot who changed the rules of the Chinese presidency in 2018 so he could rule for life. His minions are currently rewriting China’s history books to present him as an epochal leader alongside – or maybe even towering above – Chinese Communist Party founder Mao Zedong.

Chinese President Xi Jinping toasts the guests during a banquet marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China on September 30, 2019 in Beijing, China. (Naohiko Hatta/Getty Images)

Another Xinhua dispatch on Wednesday hailed Xi for encouraging China’s athletes to achieve “excellence” by dropping some poetry on them: “Only those who withstand the freezing cold could enjoy the fragrance of plum blossoms.”

The news on Wednesday continued to be bleak from Xi’an, the city of 11 million at the center of China’s new coronavirus outbreak.

A woman wrote a post on the Weibo microblogging site (China’s version of Twitter) that said her pregnant aunt miscarried in agony after she was refused care at a Xi’an hospital until her coronavirus test results came back. The tragic post garnered almost 6 million views, becoming a top trending topic on Weibo and prompting anguished phone calls to the Xi’an hospital, before it was unceremoniously deleted by Communist Party censors.

The people of Xi’an have grown increasingly bold in their criticism of the government’s poorly-planned and heartless “zero Covid” response. Other Weibo posts challenging official narratives and shredding all-is-well propaganda from the Communist Party have racked up thousands of views.

“In today’s Xian, you can starve to death, can get sick and die, but you just cannot die of Covid,” one Weibo commenter noted glumly.