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Beijing will host the 2022 Winter Olympics. Calls for a boycott of the 2022 Games on human rights grounds are “doomed to failure”, a Chinese government spokesperson says. Photo: Reuters

‘Naming and shaming’ latest strategy by rights groups seeking boycott of Beijing Winter Olympics

  • Sponsors, other firms supporting 2022 Games named in attempt to create action over alleged human rights violations in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong
  • The IOC says awarding the Olympic Games does not mean the IOC agrees with a host nation’s political structure or human rights standards
Online room rental company Airbnb and former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon have been put on a “name-and-shame” list as part of a campaign by human rights groups calling for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in China.

The campaign – which the organisers say is backed by more than 180 groups, including the World Uygur Congress, the US Tibet Committee and the China Democracy Party – targets companies and others supporting the event scheduled for February in and around Beijing.

The groups say China is violating human rights in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong and this runs counter to the ideals of the Olympics, which contains in its charter a goal to promote a peaceful society and to preserve human dignity.

But Thomas Bach, recently elected to another four-year term as president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), responded to the boycott calls on March 12, saying the organisation was not a “super-government” that could solve political issues.

Past attempts to boycott an Olympic Games have had mixed results, yet a growing number of politicians in the European Union, Canada and the United States have started to raise questions about taking part in the upcoming Beijing event.

US Republican Senator and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney is among the latest. He called for a diplomatic boycott by US delegates in a column in The New York Times on March 15.

Xinjiang focus

A focus of the boycott campaign is China’s Xinjiang region, where rights groups cite United Nations reports and witness accounts that say as many as 1 million Uygurs and others from Muslim minority groups are held in “re-education camps”. The reports allege members of the ethnic groups face indoctrination, torture and forced labour.

Beijing has repeatedly denied the allegations, saying its policies in Xinjiang are to fight terrorism and religious extremism, and to reduce poverty. China’s foreign ministry has said the calls for a boycott violate the Olympic spirit and are “doomed to fail”.

Human rights groups and IOC leaders in Beijing Games stalemate

Zumretay Arkin, the advocacy manager at the World Uygur Congress, disagrees. She is one of the organisers behind the name-and-shame campaign, while the World Uygur Congress has asked the IOC to move the games out of China.

Arkin said in an interview that she and other activists met members of the IOC online last year, including Juan Antonio Samaranch Jnr, the chair of the coordination commission for the Beijing Winter Olympics. Arkin says the officials were “dismissive” of concerns about violations of human rights in China.

“For us, it was a clear message that the IOC did not care enough to raise this issue at all. We were very disappointed and frustrated,” Arkin said. “So what we have decided now is to name and shame” on social media and elsewhere.

The IOC disputes Arkin’s interpretation of the meeting. In an email response to questions by the Post, the IOC said the views of independent NGOs, including on human rights, were raised with China’s government and “assurances were received that the principles of the Olympic Charter will be respected”.

Airbnb made it onto the name-and-shame list as a sponsor of the Beijing Olympics, while Ban Ki-moon is head of the IOC’s ethics committee. Arkin said the World Uygur Congress sent letters to Airbnb and Moon, but neither responded.

In the same email response to the Post, the IOC said: “the IOC Ethics Commission stated that it will remain vigilant to ensure that the principles of the Olympic Charter will be respected in the context of the Games”.

Airbnb had not responded to a request for comment before publication.

Moral Dilemma

John MacAloon – a sports historian and professor of social sciences and cultural history at the University of Chicago who has advised Olympic organising committees – wrote in the Journal of Olympic Studies in September about the dilemma facing the IOC over the Beijing event.

“If China maintains its ethnocidal practices at all costs while [Chinese] President Xi has an Olympic Games to declare open and preside over, and if it’s impossible now for the IOC to ensure an Olympics for the athletes anywhere else, even if it wished to, then what is the IOC to do in facing up to this situation?” he said in the article.

“The prospects are, in my opinion, morally frightening for the whole Olympic movement.”

MacAloon declined an interview request from the Post.

John Hoberman, a professor of sports studies at the University of Texas who wrote the book The Olympic Crisis: Sports, Politics and the Moral Order, said the games promote “amoral universalism”, in which all countries are entitled to take part no matter how barbaric their leaders may be.

“The IOC has collaborated with every dictatorial regime that wanted to host an Olympiad,” Hoberman said in an interview, referring to the 1936 Berlin games under the Nazi regime, the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and the 2008 summer and 2022 winter games in Beijing.

Market games

The IOC generates revenue of US$5 billion in a four-year Olympiad cycle, with 73 per cent coming from broadcast licensing and sponsorships accounting for 18 per cent, according to the organisation’s annual report.

The Post contacted the 13 Worldwide Olympic Partners listed on the Beijing Winter Olympics website and four responded.

European resorts hope Beijing 2022 will boost winter tourism

Japanese tyre company Bridgestone Corp., German insurance firm Allianz SE and carmaker Toyota Corp. all said they would not change their sponsorship agreements with the IOC, which run until the 2024 Paris Olympic Games or beyond.

Swiss watchmaker Omega SA said it was the timekeeper for the Olympics, not a sponsor, and had confirmed its involvement until at least 2032.

Taking a stand

The IOC argues that boycotts of the Olympics do not work. It said a decision by then US president Jimmy Carter to lead a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics to protest against the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan achieved nothing because Soviet forces remained in the country until 1989.

“That led to the counter-boycott of the Olympic Games Los Angeles 1984 which also did nothing except harm the athletes who, as a result of governmental actions, were prevented from attending the Games,” the IOC said in the email.

Awarding the Olympic Games to a National Olympic Committee does not mean that the IOC agrees with the political structure, social circumstances or human rights standards in its country, the IOC said.

Hoberman counters that Carter made a decision for humanitarian reasons and the current situation warranted a similar stand, suggesting that if US President Joe Biden stepped in, it “would make [Chinese President] Xi Jinping sit up and take notice”.

At the end of February, the Biden administration said it had not made a final decision on US participation in the Beijing Winter Olympics. The US Olympic Committee said it opposed a boycott.

Will it work?

David Black, a political-science professor from Dalhousie University in Canada, said sporting boycotts could work but not in the way people expected.

He referred to the boycott imposed in the 1980s against South Africa because of its apartheid policies. The isolation and criticism from countries such as Australia and New Zealand, whom white South Africans considered peers, did have an effect, he said.

“If you expect governments to change because of sanctions in an instrumental way, that often doesn’t happen. But if your objective is to send a signal that you disapprove of what they’re doing and you want to punish them, psychologically that does have an impact,” Black said.

However, today’s China is not the same as South Africa of the past. Black said that given China’s role in the world, this was now a more high stakes issue.

China will sanction countries that boycott Beijing 2022: Global Times editor

Amid the politicising, Rob Koehler, the director general for Global Athlete, a movement pushing for positive change in world sport, said athletes were again being used as pawns by the IOC and International Paralympic Committee (IPC).

“Similar discussions of a boycott occurred prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympics which is a clear display that the Olympic movement has not changed,” he said.

“The IOC and IPC first and foremost are to blame for putting athletes in this position. It is the IOC and IPC who decided to award the Games to a country with an abysmal human rights record.”

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