Despite China's Vast Religious and Political Repression, 2022 Olympic Boycott Still unlikely

Sydney Olympic Games. Creative Commons Image.

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Note: A previous version of this article misattributed the byline to Richard Ostling. Ira Rifkin wrote this column.

(OPINION) We’re rapidly approaching the inflection point on whether China will get to stage the 2022 Winter Olympics without some sort of concurrent international protest — such as a major boycott — prompted by Beijing’s often outrageous treatment of its Muslim Uighur, Tibetan Buddhist and underground Christian religious minorities, as well as its secular pro-democracy movement.

The question for me is: Will the international community — and in particular the United States and other democracy-espousing nations — punk out as it did with the Nazi-run 1936 Berlin Olympics. Or will the International community find some righteous backbone and either boycott the 2022 winter games, or make its opposition to Beijing’s policies known in another significant and unmistakable manner?

China, of course, has threatened retaliation against any nation that dares to challenge it by linking the Olympics and human rights.

When I last posted about the possibility of an international boycott of the upcoming China Games, — back in 2019 — I wrote off any boycott possibility as an extreme long shot.

As of this writing, I think a widespread boycott is still highly unlikely. But it’s no longer a completely dismissible long shot, I believe, because of changed circumstances — not the least of which is the ongoing coronavirus crisis and China’s oblique explanations of the pandemic’s Wuhan region origins.

Why still unlikely? Ironically, for the very same reason a protest is now slightly more conceivable, the coronavirus.

The U.S., without which no boycott can succeed, as well as its major pro-Western democratic allies, are all still deeply engaged in trying to halt the coronavirus.

We don’t know how much longer this fight will go on or what surprises are ahead. Regardless, the effort has left them economically vulnerable and politically drained. I’d say they lack the necessary additional emotional and intellectual bandwidth to take on another international crisis. Certainly not one they can avoid without triggering immediate dire consequences for their own citizens.

Forget the morality of the situation. Moral avoidance is a well-honed government strategy with a global heritage. So far, at least, it appears to again be the strategy of choice.

Just last week, for example, The Washington Post ran this news piece on the Biden White House’s confused messaging on the issue.

This lengthy excerpt lays bare the situation.

After months of sidestepping questions about a potential Olympics boycott, the State Department indicated [April 6] that the United States and its allies were discussing whether and how to do so in retaliation for Beijing’s allegedly genocidal repression of the Uyghur minority.

“I wouldn’t want to put a timeframe on it, but these discussions are underway,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters in a back and forth about the U.S. withholding its participation in the Games.

“It [a boycott] is something that we certainly wish to discuss and that it is certainly something that we understand that a coordinated approach will be not only in our interests but also in the interests of our allies and partners,” Price said. “So this is one of the issues that is on the agenda both now and going forward, and when we have something to announce, we will be sure to do that.”

A day later, on Wednesday, the White House unequivocally walked back those comments.

“We have not discussed and are not discussing any joint boycott with allies and partners,” press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. “We of course consult closely with allies and partners at all levels to define our common concerns and establish a shared approach.”

“But there's no discussion underway of a change in our plans regarding the Beijing Olympics from the United States' point of view,” Psaki said.

Hours before Psaki spoke, Japan — America’s closest ally in Asia, and the host of the 2020 Summer Olympics, now postponed to July 2021 because of the pandemic — denied it was part of any such conversations.

This past Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken added Cabinet-level backing to Psaki’s remarks. With the Beijing Games still a year away, Blinken said, the U.S. is “not focused on a boycott” though it is “consulting closely with our allies and partners, listening to them, listening to concerns."

Back in 2019, I reasoned that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was more concerned with its bottom line than human rights concerns, and would be unlikely to raise a stink about Beijing’s abysmal treatment of its religious minorities and political dissidents.

I also wrote that China’s economic power — think about its links to Big Tech and beyond — had become so great that few in the international community would risk angering Beijing by boycotting the Games over moral issues that can dismiss with little risk of much domestic blowback.

Here’s the top of a late-March piece from The Economist that provides additional background.

WHEN the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded the 2022 Winter Olympics to Beijing, some people criticised the decision because of China’s human-rights record. Just in the previous few weeks China had rounded up hundreds of civil-society activists across the country. But the rival candidate for the games was another authoritarian state, Kazakhstan. Democracies such as Norway had pulled out of the race. And few people even imagined that, within two years, China would be building a gulag in Xinjiang to incarcerate more than 1m ethnic Uyghurs because of their religious and cultural beliefs.

Attitudes in the West towards China have hardened a lot since the [IOC] made its decision. In January America called the repression in Xinjiang “genocide”. On March 22nd it joined Britain, Canada and the European Union in a simultaneous declaration of sanctions against Chinese officials involved in that region’s atrocities. It was a rare co-ordinated attempt by Western powers to put pressure on China over its human-rights record. They have been riled, too, by China’s clampdown in Hong Kong and its growing challenge to liberal norms globally. The winter games, which are due to begin on February 4th, will be among the most controversial in Olympic history.

It’s certainly true that lone U.S. political voices have started to speak about a boycott. Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney is among the more prominent ones.

It’s also true that elite voices in major media have been publishing a steady stream of pro-boycott, anti-China editorials and opinion columns. Examples include this piece from Newsweek, this from The New York Times and this one from Foxnews.com.

Note that the authors pretty much span the American political spectrum.

This piece from the Christian Science Monitor is one of the better ones I’ve seen that attempted to explain the possible long-term negative consequences for democratic norms should China be allowed to treat its citizens as cruelly as it wishes — while also getting to bask in the international glory hosting the Olympics provides. Here’s the link.

Finally, read this New York Times explainer that tackles how China’s economic power — focusing on issues in the clothing marketplace — makes it so difficult for democracies to distant themselves from dictatorial Beijing’s repressive actions. Consider this:

If they fail to purge Xinjiang cotton from their supply chains, the apparel companies invite legal enforcement from Washington under an American ban on imports. Labor activists will charge them with complicity in the grotesque repression of the Uyghurs.

But forsaking Xinjiang cotton entails its own troubles — the wrath of Chinese consumers who denounce the attention on the Uyghurs as a Western plot to sabotage China’s development.

The global brands can protect their sales in North America and Europe, or preserve their markets in China. It is increasingly difficult to see how they can do both.

So, again, will there be a broad boycott? As I said, I think it’s still highly unlikely.

Unless — and this is a big if — China does something so outrageously counter to Western democratic norms, like a military move against Taiwan or massive bloodshed in Hong Kong. Or it’s irrefutably shown that Beijing was recklessly responsible for the pandemic in ways so far only guessed at.

Such seismic shifts could change the calculations in some powerful nations. But don’t hold your breathe.

One last thought for journalists. Do religious leaders you regularly cover have anything to say about this morally compromised situation? I think they should. So why not ask?

This piece first appeared at Get Religion.