Ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics to be held in Beijing and neighboring cities, China is working overtime to make sure the event is a success.
Beijing has budgeted US$3.9 billion for repurposing and building new venues, and spent an additional US$8.3 billion on a high-speed rail connecting Beijing with another host city, Zhangjiakou.
Under a plan to get the population excited about the event, at least 2,000 schools have been instructed to include winter sports in their curriculum by the end of the year and a giant clock in Beijing counts down the time left before the Games begin. The official slogan is: “Joyful rendezvous upon pure ice and snow.”
Illustration: Mountain People
However, that joyful rendezvous is increasingly under threat as calls for a boycott of the event grow louder.
Earlier this month, British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Dominic Raab said that his country would not rule out a boycott, adding that there comes a point when it is “not possible” to “separate sport from diplomacy and politics.”
Last month, more than 160 human rights groups sent a letter to International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach, calling for the Games to be moved from China on the basis of rights abuses in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and Inner Mongolia.
Hong Kong activists such as Joshua Wong (黃之鋒) are lobbying countries like Canada, a key contender in the Winter Games, to boycott the occasion.
US Senator Rick Scott has called on the IOC to stand up to Beijing the way it did when the committee banned apartheid South Africa from the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo.
In August, former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith, a British member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China with politicians from 16 countries and representatives from the European Parliament, called on the British government to boycott the Olympics, describing China as “dictatorial, aggressive [and] intolerant.”
For Beijing, which would be the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Olympics, the 2022 Games represent a new level of prestige on the international stage — an additional step up from the 2008 event that marked China’s entrance onto the world stage as a major economy. Fewer countries can afford to effectively compete to host the event.
“For China, the 2008 Summer Olympics was their coming-out party,” said Jung Woo-lee, a lecturer in sports and leisure policy at the University of Edinburgh.
“The 2022 Winter Olympics is likely to be a cultural spectacle which declares that China is not only an economic powerhouse, but also a magnet of attractive global culture and high-tech industry,” he said.
The exclusivity of the Winter Games makes a potential boycott all the more threatening. Ahead of the 2008 Olympics, similar calls were made, citing China’s suppression of Tibet and other abuses. A boycott never materialized, but the impact would likely have been minimal, observers say.
“Too many countries would still have taken part in 2008,” said Alan Bairner, a professor of sport and social theory at Loughborough University. “Unlike the Summer Games which involve so many countries that are economically dependent on China, the big Winter Olympics players are less so and if they decide boycott, there won’t be much left.”
The threat of boycott comes as relations between China and some of the main players in the Winter Olympics are at their worst point in decades. China has held two Canadians in detention for almost two years in what many believe to be retaliation for Ottawa’s arrest of Huawei Technologies Co chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟) at the request of the US.
A boycott appears more likely against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Beijing’s ties with other countries from the US to Australia and the UK, struggling to contain the virus that some blame Beijing for allowing to spread, have deteriorated.
Yet Beijing has so far shrugged off the protests.
“By linking the so-called human rights issue with the Winter Olympics in an attempt to pressure China, certain organizations have made the mistake of politicizing sporting events,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) said last month.
However, observers say that momentum is building.
Distrust of China is stronger than before the 2008 Olympics, an event that some hoped would encourage the fast-developing country to liberalize the way that the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games led to political reform and the gradual introduction of democracy in South Korea, then under a military dictatorship.
“Up until the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China had been gradually becoming freer in many aspects of the civil society, so the idea of pushing for China to liberalize through giving it the opportunity to host [an] Olympic Games was an idea that in many people’s mind had genuine potential,” said Yaqiu Wang (王亞秋), a China researcher for Human Rights Watch.
“This approach has not worked. Human rights abuses since [Chinese President] Xi Jinping (習近平) has come to power have gone substantially worse, and China is not responding to condemnations and calls for change,” Yaqiu Wang said. “All of these have made boycotting an approach that is gaining more and more traction.”
Critics and human rights advocates say that one day the international community would regret awarding the event to Beijing, whose policies of mass internment and suppression of Muslim minorities have been revealed over the past few years to increasing alarm.
Jules Boykoff, a professor in the department of politics and government at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, noted comparisons to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin when Adolf Hitler used the event to showcase Nazi propaganda.
“In a way, one could argue that there were fewer unknowns about China in 2015 when the IOC picked Beijing to host the 2022 Olympics than when the IOC chose Berlin to host the 1936 Olympics,” Boykoff said.
There is much evidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is sending soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and is learning lessons for a future war against Taiwan. Until now, the CCP has claimed that they have not sent PLA personnel to support Russian aggression. On 18 April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinskiy announced that the CCP is supplying war supplies such as gunpowder, artillery, and weapons subcomponents to Russia. When Zelinskiy announced on 9 April that the Ukrainian Army had captured two Chinese nationals fighting with Russians on the front line with details
On a quiet lane in Taipei’s central Daan District (大安), an otherwise unremarkable high-rise is marked by a police guard and a tawdry A4 printout from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicating an “embassy area.” Keen observers would see the emblem of the Holy See, one of Taiwan’s 12 so-called “diplomatic allies.” Unlike Taipei’s other embassies and quasi-consulates, no national flag flies there, nor is there a plaque indicating what country’s embassy this is. Visitors hoping to sign a condolence book for the late Pope Francis would instead have to visit the Italian Trade Office, adjacent to Taipei 101. The death of
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), joined by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), held a protest on Saturday on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei. They were essentially standing for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is anxious about the mass recall campaign against KMT legislators. President William Lai (賴清德) said that if the opposition parties truly wanted to fight dictatorship, they should do so in Tiananmen Square — and at the very least, refrain from groveling to Chinese officials during their visits to China, alluding to meetings between KMT members and Chinese authorities. Now that China has been defined as a foreign hostile force,
On April 19, former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) gave a public speech, his first in about 17 years. During the address at the Ketagalan Institute in Taipei, Chen’s words were vague and his tone was sour. He said that democracy should not be used as an echo chamber for a single politician, that people must be tolerant of other views, that the president should not act as a dictator and that the judiciary should not get involved in politics. He then went on to say that others with different opinions should not be criticized as “XX fellow travelers,” in reference to
RSS