The Winter Olympic Games are set to begin on 4 February 2022 – and will do so under the shadow of a diplomatic ban by several large nations. The US, Australia, United Kingdom and Canada have all announced that no diplomatic representatives will attend the Games in Beijing, China. This is an approach designed to highlight human rights violations perpetrated by the People’s Republic of China (PRC); it aims to dent the host nation’s pride while leaving athletes free to compete.
The political intricacies of the Olympic Games are bountiful. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) takes great pride in bringing over 200 national teams together to compete in peace and friendship. The Committee, bound by the principles of the Olympic charter, acts under the values of neutrality and noninterference. However, the IOC also maintains a keen sense of importance in its political positioning and place in the international political sphere . A boycott of the Games displays a diversion from global unity which would, in turn, deviate from the Olympic charter and ultimately the IOC’s mission.
As mentioned, a diplomatic boycott is designed to wound the pride of the host nation, which often has both sporting and political motives for staging events as big as an Olympic Game or World Cup. Such boycotts are not new. Between 1976 and 1984, the Olympics witnessed three major boycotts of more than 100 nations. At the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games, mostly African nations staged a boycott against New Zealand, whose rugby team had toured apartheid South Africa. At the 1980 Moscow Olympics, the US and other nations did not participate in protest of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviet bloc and its allies retaliated at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics by boycotting the Games.
So, the Olympic Games, an opportunity to enhance peace and open dialogue between nations, has yet again fallen prey to global political controversy. China’s response to the US’s boycott was hostile; on Twitter, it vowed retaliation. It went on to say that the US was behaving with a Cold War mentality and spoiling the Olympic spirit. It’s worth noting, though, that China has used the boycott system itself in the past: between 1956 and 1980, China boycotted the Games because of Taiwan’s attendance.
What events have driven the latest boycott? For one thing the US has, on multiple occasions, accused the PRC of genocide. The overwhelmingly Muslim minority group, the Uyghurs, in the Western region of Xinjiang allegedly face gross human rights abuses at the hands of the Chinese government. Elsewhere, the relationship between the PRC and Canada turned rocky in 2018, after the arrest of a high-level Huawei executive in Canada at the request of the US. China, in retaliation, detained two Canadians. All three were later released. The boycott also aims to highlight the repression of political freedoms in Hong Kong and the disappearance of top Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai after she accused a top Chinese official of assault.
The situation in Xinjiang is of great concern and is the US’s primary motive for the boycott. The mass detention of Uyghurs and other minorities in alleged “education camps” has sparked outcry and outrage from much of the international community. In recent years the PRC has escalated a crackdown on the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities with sweeping surveillance, mass detention and forced assimilation. Video surveillance and police checkpoints constantly keep citizens under close watch. The US estimates that over 1 million Uyghurs, roughly 10% of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, are being detained by Chinese authorities.
The Chinese government justifies its detention of Uyghur people as a means to curb terrorism and Islamic extremism. However, the detention is in fact part of a larger campaign devised by Beijing to strengthen Han unity in the PRC, by weeding out ethnic minorities. The campaign wishes to stamp out ethnic minorities to ensure the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ideals remain paramount.
The diplomatic boycott seems to be the latest example of a soured relationship between long-time opponents the US and China. The US has already angered China by saying it would come to the aid of Taiwan if it’s invaded by the PRC; China, meanwhile, strengthened its relations with Russia against the US’s wishes.
The Winter Olympics are but yet another instance of vying global powers battling for the political upper hand. Whether the diplomatic boycott will achieve its aims remains to be seen.