Former secretary of state builds boycott case amid U.S.-China talks, warns athletes and journalists could be in peril.
Former secretary of state builds boycott case amid U.S.-China talks, warns athletes and journalists could be in peril.
F ormer Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in an extensive interview with National Review, openly warned Thursday that China could detain athletes and journalists from the U.S. and elsewhere should the 2022 Olympic Games proceed as planned in Beijing.
He specifically warned of a scenario where Olympians speaking out or protesting over the Chinese Communist Party’s Uyghur genocide could be denied permission to exit China, under a new security law.
“I can’t imagine any athlete from anywhere in the world not knowing what’s going on in Western China, and not wanting to be able to talk about that. And yet, if they chose to do so inside of China today, I think, a likely outcome is the Chinese Communist Party would deny them their exit,” Pompeo said. “That’s just dangerous and unacceptable. We shouldn’t force athletes to suffer that choice.”
The Trump administration official had previously said, in comments to the Washington Examiner and radio host Hugh Hewitt, that he wants a U.S. boycott of the 2022 Olympics, but he went into detail about the scenario he fears during his interview with NR — in which he also discussed the reasoning behind his decision to label the persecution of the Uyghurs a genocide and the meeting between top Biden administration officials and their Chinese counterparts today in Alaska.
A number of prominent U.S. politicians and human-rights advocates have criticized the decision to host the games in Beijing, given the CCP’s brutal campaign against the Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in Xinjiang. At a rally in front of the White House yesterday organized by a number of Uyghur and Tibetan groups, Tursunay Ziawudun, whose experience of rape in the Uyghur camps was documented recently by the BBC, said, “I cannot believe this genocidal country is hosting the Olympic Games in 2022.”
In January, Pompeo, while still secretary of state, issued a formal determination that such a crime is taking place: “I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese party-state.”
Pompeo said Thursday that he worked with the International Olympic Committee to “deliver them a set of facts that unmistakably demonstrates that the Chinese Communist Party ought not to be rewarded with the noble efforts that Olympians undertake.”
“The IOC has a moral responsibility to the world to say we’re simply not going to permit a set of leaders to behave in this way to destroy an entire group of people,” he continued.
The International Olympic Committee, however, under the leadership of its president Thomas Bach, has been unwavering in its determination to ensure the games take place in Beijing. On Friday, the committee once again rejected calls to move the 2022 games, saying that it is not a “super world government,” though Bach also claimed that the committee is monitoring the human-rights situation in China closely.
The former secretary of state warned that if the Olympics do take place in the Chinese capital, athletes and journalists from the U.S. and other countries would risk retribution from the Communist Party for speaking out. In May, China passed a “national-security law” to clamp down on dissent in Hong Kong, but it has also been used against non-Chinese nationals abroad for their speech in Western democracies.
“Imagine you work for the company that is broadcasting the games, and you see something that you want the world to know,” Pompeo said. “Imagine the conundrum you find yourself in. The moment [you] articulate that from your television booth in China, you will violate their national-security law, and you’re subject to not be permitted to depart from China.”
Pompeo, who joined the Hudson Institute as a senior fellow after leaving government, has faced his own retribution from the Chinese regime, which on January 20 announced sanctions against him and over 20 other outgoing Trump administration officials. He told National Review this was retaliation for work “in the finest tradition of American diplomacy and national security” and “a message to the next administration.”
Asked about today’s meeting between his successor Antony Blinken and National-Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi — the CCP’s top foreign-affairs officials — in Anchorage, Pompeo was demure about the Biden administration’s approach, saying that the U.S. officials “should be given all the space to do what they need to do.”
The former secretary of state, who held a similar meeting with CCP foreign policy director Yang in Honoloulu this past summer, told NR that he’s shared his insights with the Biden administration about his own previous meetings with the Chinese, “and they’ve been most gracious in trying to take that on board.”
He also cautioned that the Chinese officials “use dialogue as a delay tactic,” adding that his talks in Hawaii — which he said were requested by the Chinese side — amounted to “a very long set of meetings over the course of days. And they showed up with no intention of changing anything about the actions that they were undertaking.”
In February, Yang gave a strident speech to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, in which he laid blame for the decline in bilateral ties exclusively on Washington. He criticized U.S. policy for “harassing Chinese students, restricting Chinese media outlets, shutting down Confucius Institutes and suppressing Chinese companies” and reiterated the CCP’s demands that the U.S. stop “interfering in the affairs of Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang” — regions in which the CCP is engaged in widespread human-rights abuses.
Previewing the Anchorage talks, a senior Biden administration official told reporters this week that one of the goals of the discussions is “making very clear our deep concerns about a range of issues, whether it’s Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Chinese economic coercion of our allies and partners, China’s increasingly aggressive activities across the Taiwan Strait.”
During his interview with NR, Pompeo offered a simple exhortation to the Biden administration based on his own experience with the CCP’s delay tactics. “They didn’t slow us down at all, and I hope that this administration will see that talk, that rhetoric, for precisely what it is, and measure how they’ll respond to China — not from their words but from their deeds.”