An Olympic Boycott Wouldn't Accomplish Much
But the current controversy involving China should prompt the IOC to change the way it organizes the Games
The opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics is about two months away and it is going to be awkward. Various groups around the world are calling for a boycott of the games given China’s rotten human rights record.
The main issue is the government’s treatment of Muslim Uighurs (pronounced WE-gurrs) in the far western region of Xinjiang. Since 2014, the Chinese government has detained an estimated 1-3 million Uighurs and other Muslim nationals in internment camps, where prisoners have been forced to participate in re-education programs designed to instill loyalty in the Chinese Communist Party. Detainees have been tortured and raped. Satellite evidence suggests there are nearly 400 such camps in the region, resulting in the largest detention of an ethnic group since World War II.
Meanwhile, throughout Xinjiang and in the camps, the Chinese government has forced Muslims into factory labor. Additionally, many Uighur women have been sterilized or forced to have abortions. As a result, the birth rate in Xinjiang has fallen by about 25%. Muslim children have been separated from their parents and enrolled in traditional Chinese schools. Movement within and in-and-out of the region is monitored by a high-tech police state that uses cellphone data, facial recognition technology, and DNA tracing to monitor the activities of residents. Traditional Muslim practices such as growing beards or wearing veils have been banned, while practices devout Muslims avoid such as smoking and drinking alcohol have been encouraged. Many mosques, Muslim shrines, and Muslim cemeteries have been razed. All of this has led governments and organizations around the world to characterize what is going on in Xinjiang as “severe human rights violations,” “crimes against humanity,” “institutional repression,” “cultural genocide,” or (in a statement issued by the United States government on the last full day of the Trump administration and maintained by the Biden administration) a “genocide.”
The Chinese government has acknowledged the existence of the camps but claims they are job training centers. Pressed further, Beijing has defended their crackdown on human rights in Xinjiang as necessary to combat terrorism and a separatist Uighur movement. While there has been some unrest and violence in the region, China’s response is most certainly heavy handed. A more likely explanation for China’s abusive behavior is a desire to exert control over a backwater region of the country crucial to the development of the Belt and Road Initiative, a project aimed at building a global infrastructure system that can better facilitate trade between China and the world. Overland trade routes to the Middle East and Europe would run through Xinjiang.
Concerns about China’s human rights record do not stop with the Uighurs, however. In 2019, the government of Hong Kong proposed a controversial law that would have allowed for the extradition of Hongkongers to China, an unsettling prospect given China’s tendency to stifle political dissent by disappearing critics of the communist regime. Protests against that law soon grew into a full-fledged pro-democracy movement that sought to resist Chinese encroachment on Hong Kong’s autonomy. Beijing responded in the summer of 2020 with a national security law that granted Chinese authorities broad power to crack down on dissent in the city, which they did. Many have interpreted the new law as the end of the “one country, two systems” arrangement that has guided relations between China and Hong Kong since the end of British rule in Hong Kong in 1997. And while it may have faded from the headlines, controversy over China’s administration of Tibet remains, as Buddhists there continue to protest Beijing’s assimilationist policies.
Chinese notions of individual freedom differ from western societies in that there is a much greater emphasis in China on an individual’s social and familial responsibilities. Yet even allowing for these cultural differences, concern remains that the Chinese government unjustly limits their citizens’ personal liberties, as evidenced by an ongoing situation involving tennis star and three-time Olympian Peng Shuai. Earlier this month, Peng took to social media to accuse a former high-ranking Chinese government official of sexual coercion. Peng’s message was soon deleted and she disappeared from public view, leading many in the tennis world to express concern about her well-being. Last week, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach participated in a thirty-minute video call with Peng during which Peng assured Bach she was doing fine and asked for privacy. The call did not relieve those worried about Peng, however, as they questioned whether Peng was truly able to speak for herself and if Bach was more concerned with tamping down an athletic controversy involving China on the eve of the Beijing Olympics than with Peng’s health and well-being.
Chinese oppression in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Tibet, along with the increasingly assertive authoritarianism of the Chinese communist regime, have led many around the world and in the United States to call for a boycott of the Beijing games. It should be noted tension between the United States and China has risen significantly over the past five years, which explains why many U.S. politicians are so quick to urge a boycott, but international human rights organizations and numerous governments agree that China’s actions are too serious to ignore. China’s critics argue the Olympics offer the world the opportunity to condemn what is happening in Xinjiang in conspicuous and unambiguous terms while drawing attention to the plight of the oppressed. A boycott would also deny China the prestige it seeks as an Olympic host and send a signal to China and other authoritarian nations that they must abide by international standards of human rights if they hope to participate fully in the international community. These critics encourage us to remember the lessons we should have learned in 1936 when the United States did not boycott the Summer Games held in Berlin, which Hitler used as a means to legitimize Nazi Germany on the world stage. It would be better not to be complicit in that sort of evil.
Those are strong arguments, yet while I wouldn’t necessarily oppose a boycott if a coalition of nations pursued one, I’m not convinced it would accomplish much. While a boycott would draw attention to China’s oppression of the Uighurs, it seems unlikely to actually change China’s behavior unless accompanied by other diplomatic and economic measures. If anything, China would likely spin the boycott as yet another attempt by foreign powers to manipulate its domestic affairs. A boycott would be a powerful symbol, but I’m afraid it would be just that: A symbol.
My bigger issue, though, is that when a nation boycotts the Olympics, it’s not merely boycotting the host nation but the Olympic Movement itself, which is supposed to promote peace and cross-cultural understanding among nations. Now, do the Olympics actually accomplish that? Maybe a little bit, but I doubt the Olympics have had any meaningful long-lasting effect on the way the citizens of the world view each other. I think what matters more, though, is that every two years the nations of the world are supposed to set aside their differences with one another and come together for some friendly games in the spirit of bridge-building. Just show up and play. Prove that coexistence is possible. That simple idea seems worth affirming, but you can’t do it if you’re boycotting the Olympics.
Of course, that Olympic ideal is hard to live up to when the host nation is not committed to the idea of coexistence within its own borders. But that’s where the International Olympic Committee comes into play. Nations shouldn’t have to be deciding right now whether or not to attend the 2022 Winter Olympics because the IOC should never have awarded the 2022 Games to China in the first place.
That Beijing landed the 2022 Olympics is a problem of the IOC’s own making. By the time the selection process for the 2022 Games concluded in 2015, only three cities had submitted bids to host the event: Beijing; Almaty, Kazakhstan; and Oslo, Norway. Oslo, however, had withdrawn their bid in 2014 after the Norwegian Parliament refused to fund the Games, citing cost overruns from past Olympics and outrageous demands issued by the IOC concerning the expected VIP treatment of its members. (Krakow, Poland, and Stockholm, Sweden, had also expressed interest in hosting the games but dropped their bids earlier in the process for similar reasons.) That left only Beijing and Almaty—two cities in nations The Economist’s Democracy Index had classified as “authoritarian” in 2015—as candidates. Beijing narrowly won the right to host the event by a 44-40 vote.
By all accounts, Oslo was favored to win the bidding process, but it learned what so many cities now know about hosting an Olympics: It’s a huge drain on financial resources and invites corruption. During the run-up to the Olympics, life in the host city is disrupted to accommodate the Games, and once they end, they leave behind venues that quickly fall into disuse. City leaders who express interest in hosting future Olympics soon learn their citizens often feel the prestige that comes with the Games isn’t worth the hassle or expense.
After the IOC began the process of selecting a host city for the 2024 Summer Olympics, three of the cities that had expressed interest in hosting (Hamburg, Germany; Budapest, Hungary; and Rome, Italy) dropped out for lack of public and financial support. That led the IOC to grant the two remaining cities—Paris and Los Angeles—hosting duties in 2024 and 2028 respectively. The IOC then overhauled its bidding process so that it effectively searched out cities that are interested in hosting; this is how Brisbane, Australia, was awarded the 2032 Summer Games. But this is still a messed-up process, as it leads the IOC on a less-than-transparent hunt to find a city willing spend an exorbitant amount of money and lavish undo attention on IOC members for the privilege of hosting a two-week sporting event. With a process like that, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the Olympics land back in an authoritarian country like China or Russia in the near future.
To fix this, the IOC needs to further reform the way it organizes the Olympic Games. To begin with, it could make respect for human rights a priority in the selection process. That would keep the Games out of authoritarian countries that might use the Olympics to win some unearned prestige for their regimes. Many cities in nations with good human rights records, however, would still resist hosting given the high costs associated with the event. To address that, it’s probably time for the IOC to do away with the idea of the one-and-done host city. Instead, the IOC could select three cities that could host both the Summer and Winter Olympics and rotate the Games between them so that a city would host either a Summer or Winter Olympiad every six years. The cities would have to be in countries with good human rights records and that could afford the costs associated with regularly hosting the Games (although the opportunity to reuse venues every six years would cut down on expenses.) Perhaps Oslo; Vancouver, Canada; and Sapporo, Japan, would be up for the challenge.
Or the IOC could just select one city, build all the necessary infrastructure for both the Summer and Winter Games there, and designate it the official host city of the Olympics. While it is fun seeing the Olympics visit different locales, staging the Olympics in one place year after year would eliminate many of the financial and political headaches that come with the Games. And besides, events like Wimbledon and the Rose Bowl are held in the same venue every year without complaint. The new Olympic campus and its venues could become iconic in their own right. Additionally, organizers could build each iteration of the Games around a unique cultural theme or showcase different regions of the world, granting nations that normally wouldn’t host the event a greater spotlight. I might recommend either Geneva or Lausanne (headquarters of the IOC) in Switzerland (a famously neutral nation) as a permanent host.
Selecting one city to host the Olympics may also allow the IOC to take a stronger stand in defense of human rights. Rather than constantly biting its tongue to appease the autocrats of host nations (or even staying silent when nations that pride themselves on their human rights record and democratic traditions violate their own principles or begin to backslide) the IOC could become a more vocal defender of human rights and perhaps even feel empowered to discipline nations that commit human rights violations by restricting the number of athletes they can send to the Games. (That may be a bridge too far for the IOC, though, which prefers to maximize the number of nations that participate in the Olympics, but I think it’s fair to wonder why a nation that should be disqualified from hosting an Olympics given its atrocious human rights record should still be allowed to participate in the Olympics. Maybe because the act of hosting reflects back on the government in ways that merely participating does not.)
Currently, it appears the Biden administration is likely to initiate a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Games. (President Obama did not send high profile members of his administration to the opening ceremonies of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, either.) There has been some talk in other nations of boycotting the opening ceremonies as well, although it’s fair to wonder if governments would want to involve their athletes in such a protest. While this approach may dissatisfy those who want to send a bolder signal to the Chinese government and the IOC, it would at least have the advantage of focusing attention on the actions of Chinese officials rather than the people of China or the Olympic Movement.
Pressed for comment on the controversy surrounding the Beijing Games, the IOC has offered up this boilerplate response:
The Olympic Games are the only event that brings the entire world together in peaceful competition. They are the most powerful symbol of unity in all our diversity that the world knows. In our fragile world, the power of sport to bring the whole world together, despite all the existing differences, gives us all hope for a better future.
The IOC would like the Olympics to transcend national, cultural, and political differences in order to unify the people of the world and highlight our common humanity. That’s difficult to achieve, however, when the IOC awards the Games to nations notorious for suppressing difference with state force. It puts the IOC in the awkward position of turning a blind eye to practices that run counter to the Olympics’ humanitarian mission while nations of conscience are forced to weigh whether their participation in an ostensibly non-political event provides political cover to illiberal regimes. It’s probably asking too much of the Olympics to wade into the politics of international human rights, but if it wants to avoid international disputes over that subject, the IOC would be wise not to plunk its Games right into the middle of one.
Thanks for reading.
Exit music: “No Ordinary Love” by Sade (1992, Love Deluxe)