A Beijing court has sentenced a Falun Gong practitioner to eight years in prison two weeks before the 2022 Winter Olympics. The heavy-handed sentence again spotlights the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights violations as the country seeks to glorify its political image during the upcoming Games, said Wu Shaoping, a Chinese human rights lawyer in the United States. “The International Olympic Committee [IOC] should open its eyes to the current situation of human rights in China under the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] and should not continue to cooperate with it,” Wu told The Epoch Times. “This is a shame for the IOC,” he added. Xu, a 53-year-old painter from Beijing, is one of the 11 Chinese citizens detained in July 2020 for providing photos and information to the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times during the early COVID-19 outbreak in China. All of them are Falun Gong practitioners. The spiritual …