Multiple entities had multiple opportunities to keep the Olympics out of China. All of them balked.
Multiple entities had multiple opportunities to keep the Olympics out of China. All of them balked.
T he Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics began under a number of clouds last week. Covid is still raging, a Chinese Olympic official threatened foreign athletes with legal penalties should they speak out against human-rights abuses, and the Chinese government continues to commit horrific crimes against humanity that once again make a mockery of the world’s “Never Again” vows. But no matter. Athletes have descended upon Beijing in the thousands, American corporate sponsors have stuck steadfastly by the killers of Kashgar, and NBC is beaming the Chinese Communist Party’s grand propaganda spectacle to millions of homes across America.
These Winter Games are a story of failure — an International Olympic Committee failure, a government failure, a private-sector failure, and a collective-action failure.
In 2014, four of the six initial hopeful host cities for these Olympics withdrew their bids, leaving the Lausanne-headquartered IOC to decide between Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. Despite China’s refusal to abide by human-rights assurances it had given the IOC ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympics, held in Beijing — dissidents were silenced, officially designated “protest zones” were kept empty, and there was a horrid crackdown in Tibet in the months preceding the opening ceremonies that year — the IOC did not hesitate to award another Olympiad to Beijing. Knowing full well that Chinese human-rights commitments would be meaningless, the IOC did not bother securing any. Nor, as the scale of the genocide in Xinjiang became clear in recent years, did IOC president Thomas Bach even politely suggest that Beijing alter its course. Though he was perhaps uniquely positioned to insist on an unfettered fact-finding trip to the beleaguered region, Bach instead dismissed as mere politics the credible accusations of genocide, sexual violence, torture, and forced labor.
That Bach oversaw this ethical failure comes as little surprise, given his track record. That successive White Houses barely batted an eye is more troubling. Human-rights conditions in Xinjiang and elsewhere should have been reason enough for the Trump administration to launch an effort to pressure the IOC to move the games and, if that failed, to work with democracies to hold parallel “Freedom Games.” But there were other reasons to pursue such a course, ranging from athlete safety to Covid to geopolitics. Yet President Trump sat on his hands for years and President Biden picked up where his predecessor left off — doing nothing.
The Biden administration finally announced a diplomatic boycott in December 2021, a mere two months before the opening ceremonies, and in so doing sacrificed a golden opportunity to raise global awareness of a genocide and bring more pressure to bear on China to halt it. Instead of keeping U.S. officials home, the Biden administration should have sent a delegation composed entirely of officials concerned with human-rights and democracy issues. In Beijing, they would have had daily occasion to engage with the international press about PRC abuses. China might not have allowed such a delegation into the country, but President Biden should have forced that decision on Xi Jinping. A diplomatic boycott is a useful way to signal displeasure and concern for human-rights abuses, but it was also a convenient way for the administration to attempt to wash its hands of the Olympic conundrum entirely.
American corporate sponsors have tried to wash their hands of the problem as well. By avoiding Olympic-themed marketing in the United States, they have sought to avoid the ire of American consumers. But those same sponsors have been happy to spend big in China. Last summer, Coca-Cola’s global head of human rights, Paul Lalli, told Representative Tom Malinowski (D., N.J.) at a congressional hearing: “We respect all human rights and condemn any abuses. Our role as a sponsor is to embed those fundamental principles in these mega-sporting events.” But of course Coke and its fellow sponsors are doing no such thing. Rather, they are telling both Beijing and the IOC that, despite corporate commitments to uphold human rights, all they really care about is making a buck.
To be sure, corporate sponsors possess limited leverage over Beijing. Xi Jinping is not going to call off the genocide because Coke pulls its business from China. But those sponsors do have significant leverage over the IOC because they can threaten its bottom line. Alas, principles are in short supply in corporate America.
But even as activist organizations and members of Congress have demanded that American businesses operating in China show some backbone, it is American consumers who have the ability to actually impose costs. But they — we — have not done so. Significant boycott movements have targeted neither NBC nor top-tier Olympic sponsors. There has been no public outrage about the ongoing genocide nor about the Olympics again occurring in a country that is home to concentration camps.
From the halls of power in Washington and Lausanne to the beverage aisles in grocery stores across America, we have all failed the Uyghurs and other victims of PRC rights abuses, to some degree. While they suffer at the hands of a genocidal regime, the rest of us blithely gorge on the bread and circuses that the regime serves up. Shame on us all.