Frederic J Brown/AFP via Creative Commons
Activists have been demanding a boycott for months over concerns about China's human rights record.
By the time you read this, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, set for February 4–20, will be underway—unless they’ve been canceled at the last moment due to the pandemic. But that’s probably not going to happen. As we saw in Tokyo last summer, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has never minded the games becoming a global superspreader event if the alternative is losing ungodly sums of television revenue.
If there was going to be a boycott of these Olympics, the gravitational pull for other nations would have to start with the United States.
The question is whether these Olympic games should have been canceled anyway, irrespective of COVID-19. The United States and other Western nations faced strong pressure to boycott these winter games, given China’s deplorable record on human rights.
The Chinese government has generated international outrage over its treatment of Tibet, its wholesale oppression of the Uyghur Muslims, its labor abuses, and its volatile relationship with Hong Kong. Momentum for a boycott seemed tangible, especially when the Chinese government “disappeared” three-time Chinese Olympic tennis player Peng Shuai after she accused one of China’s most powerful politicians of sexual assault. (Peng Shuai reappeared weeks later to deny her own accusations.)
Amid this frightening state of affairs, feckless IOC President Thomas Bach has chosen to do less than nothing, not only ignoring the pleas from human rights organizations, but also whitewashing Peng Shuai’s reappearance. He said he had spoken to Peng Shuai and all was well; they had dinner plans upon his arrival in Beijing.
If there was going to be a boycott of these Olympics, the gravitational pull for other nations would have to start with the United States. But alas, the magnetic force in the other direction proved to be too strong. President Joe Biden did cancel the normal diplomatic mission that comes with the Olympics, but that was as far as he would go.
To enact a true boycott would not only require political courage, but it would be like sticking out your chin and begging to be punched by the entire political class, possibly including people in your own party, as well as pollsters and the public.
These kinds of state boycotts are political poison for a number of reasons. First, the only people who truly suffer because of a boycott are the athletes themselves. They become understandably sympathetic figures, and no President wants to be seen as denying athletes their long-sought opportunity to perform the triple axel they’ve been practicing for years. Jimmy Carter learned this lesson the hard way with the boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow which, despite majority public support, was deeply contested by athletes and questioned by foreign policy experts.
Besides, a boycott was never going to happen this year because China and its archipelago of sweatshops remain central to the global economy. Everyone is in bed with China, so the hypocrisy and public preening of saying that the Olympics are somehow too pure to be hosted by China would pass the smell test of only the truly naïve.
Any boycott would also raise the temperature dramatically on U.S.-China relations. The U.S. political right is braying for more confrontation with China, and a boycott would only strengthen its hand.
Now, Olympic athletes can pick up the political mantle from those making toothless state department threats and use the staging ground of the Olympics to call for solidarity with the Uyghur Muslims, Tibet, or China’s political prisoners. The IOC and Thomas Bach, with their utter absence of outrage after Peng Shuai’s disappearance, have shown that they will side with China and with the silencing of athletes.
“The Beijing Olympics throw a spotlight on how the grifting princelings at the International Olympic Committee are more than willing to ignore the principles enshrined in the Olympic Charter in order to keep their money spigot open,” Jules Boykoff, political science professor and author of Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics, tells me. “The Beijing Games exemplify how the IOC’s much-vaunted moral authority is so easily and willingly leached away to economic exigency.”
Boykoff says the IOC’s position on Beijing boils down to “ ‘both-sidesing’ human rights in order to make a profit.” He’s right.
The International Olympic Committee likes to say it brings the games to places like Beijing because it will cause these nations to become more like the Western world. The opposite is taking place—the IOC is helping normalize a set of political practices that will make the rest of the world look a hell of a lot more like Beijing.