The China You Won’t See during the Winter Olympics By Jimmy Quinn
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-china-you-wont-see-during-the-winter-olympics/
The Chinese Communist Party will do everything in its power to sanitize its atrocious human-rights record.
T he Chinese Communist Party — its international reputation having suffered a blow as a result of the Covid pandemic, its human-rights abuses, and its saber-rattling — hopes to score a massive propaganda victory in the coming weeks as thousands of athletes from 90 countries converge on Beijing for the 2022 Winter Olympics.
The Games, which will formally kick off with the opening ceremony today, are being held within a “closed loop” accessible to only 60,000 people amid stringent public-health measures.
China has reason to be confident in its ability to pull the wool over the eyes of the international community. Perpetration of mass atrocities were not enough to persuade the International Olympic Committee to move the event. The U.S. — in addition to the U.K., Canada, Australia, Lithuania, and a handful of others — is diplomatically boycotting but has stopped short of a hard boycott of the actual sporting events, and President Biden will still watch the Olympics. The 21 world leaders in Beijing for the opening ceremony today mostly represent different autocracies. (Vladimir Putin is among them, and the U.S. couldn’t persuade Poland’s president to bail.) Meanwhile, with billions of dollars in investments and corporate sponsorships at stake, there is a heavy incentive for many in the West to look the other way.
As with the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin and China’s previous hosting of the 2008 Olympics, the opening ceremony will serve a lot of pomp and circumstance to divert attention from military expansionism, totalitarianism, and oppression of minority groups.
The last time Beijing hosted, it took a bludgeon to human rights, with the Games taking place against the backdrop of an intensifying CCP campaign to crush Tibet’s independence movement and a crackdown on dissent in Beijing.
The human-rights situation within China has only deteriorated since 2008. The Olympics takes place with Xi Jinping on his way to a third term as the party’s general secretary. Beijing’s campaign to snuff out a distinct Tibetan identity and its efforts to silence dissidents have grown more dire over the past 14 years, with a recent report from the Tibet Action Institute revealing a yearslong policy by which some 80 percent of Tibetan children have been placed in boarding schools to assimilate them.
Add to that a number of other concerning events.
Starting in 2020, Beijing has all but eliminated Hong Kong’s autonomy and democracy with its imposition of a new national-security law. Effectively, the party criminalized any speech it deems to be dangerous — and claimed the ability to prosecute offenders anywhere in the world.
Key pro-democracy figures were imprisoned or forced into exile, and the city’s authorities shuttered independent sources of news, most prominently Apple Daily.
Campaigns against Christians, Falun Gong adherents, and other religious minorities in China continued apace, and in 2020, the party initiated a new effort in Inner Mongolia to assimilate ethnic Mongolians into Han nationalist identity, prohibiting schools there from using the Mongolian language.
But the proximate cause of Western outrage over the Games is the genocide of Uyghurs.
A wealth of evidence amassed by researchers, journalists, and victims has over the past five years revealed that the Chinese government, in a campaign ordered by Xi, is working to eliminate that ethnic minority group.
It’s a campaign that seeks to stamp out any outward symbols of religiosity — many Uyghurs are Muslims — and arbitrarily detain hundreds of thousands in reeducation camps. The party wants to control the demographic growth of Uyghurs and other minorities in the Xinjiang region — which is why it forcibly sterilizes women and imposes abortions on others. Another government program also assigns party cadres to cohabit with Uyghur families — an assimilationist campaign that Uyghur advocates have characterized as mass rape, since Han men occupy the beds of men sent to the camps. Last year, a concentration-camp survivor revealed that she and some other detainees were raped as part of a systematic campaign by the concentration-camp authorities. It’s no coincidence that these atrocities have left Uyghur women barren and that, since 2018, the year that the forced-sterilization component of this campaign began, Uyghur birth rates have plummeted.
In January 2021, the State Department determined that all of this meets the criteria for the most heinous crimes recognized by law: genocide and crimes against humanity.
Then–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo concluded that the campaign against Uyghurs meets all of the criteria under the U.N. Genocide Convention, given that the Chinese party-state’s campaign is clearly about destroying the Uyghur people. Just as heinous, Pompeo and his team determined, were the party’s crimes against humanity targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang.
But the party has, since then, fought strenuously to counter growing recognition of its mass-atrocity crimes. The Games are perhaps the biggest stage on which it can push back against that narrative. In the run-up to the Olympics, Chinese state media have been pumping out stories about happy Uyghur children involved in snow sports in anticipation of the Olympic Games, and it’s likely that similar themes, whitewashing the mass atrocities, will feature in the opening ceremony.
Unfortunately, some of the most powerful people in the world are saying that the Games are about international peace and understanding, and that discussing human rights would unnecessarily politicize them. IOC president Thomas Bach repeated that refrain, with which he’s deflected criticism of his organization, during a press conference yesterday: “If we are taking a political standpoint, and we are getting in the middle of tensions and disputes and confrontations between political powers, then we are putting the Olympics at risk.”
The IOC has hugged the Chinese Communist Party leadership, defended the decision to host the Games in Beijing, and failed to speak out about the ongoing atrocities. It partnered with a Chinese company under U.S. sanctions for complicity in the genocide and worked to deflect criticism of the party for its detention of tennis star Peng Shuai.
The U.N. has taken a similar stance. This week, the South China Morning Post reported on suspicions that the U.N. is holding off on releasing a highly anticipated and long-overdue report on Xinjiang to avoid embarrassing Beijing during the Olympics.
And U.N. secretary-general Antonio Guterres is in Beijing for the opening ceremony. He’s expected to meet with Bach and Chinese-government officials, despite pleas from the Biden administration to skip or at least to raise the issue in talks with the Chinese. His attendance at the Olympics, he said during a press conference last month, is not political, but rather intended to reaffirm the Olympic ideal amid rising xenophobia, anti-Muslim hatred, and antisemitism. Guterres also dodged a question about whether he’d raise the situation in Xinjiang with Chinese officials.
The corporate sponsors of the Games have toed that line, as well. Among the TOP (The Olympic Partner) sponsors of the Games — an official designation for the corporate sponsors — are five American companies: Airbnb, Coca-Cola, Intel, Procter & Gamble, and Visa.
Those companies have all weathered the negative press coverage that’s come with their Olympics sponsorship, declining to speak out in any meaningful way. The consequences of angering the Chinese government and netizens looms as far scarier.
Intel learned that the hard way in December, responding to the enactment of a bill cracking down on imports of forced-labor-tainted products from Xinjiang. The California-based semiconductor-chip company issued a note to its suppliers urging them to comply with that law, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
The reaction in China was furious. Within a few days, Intel had issued a Chinese-language apology and taken down the paragraph on its website specifying that its suppliers should avoid Xinjiang supply chains. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger explained: “We found that there was no reason for us to call out one region in particular anywhere in the world because there’s many regions in the world that are having issues of such a matter,” adding that Intel had never used materials produced in Xinjiang.
For its part, Airbnb still has listings in the Xinjiang region — very likely on land held by an entity sanctioned by the U.S. government for its involvement in the genocide. Coca-Cola — which defended its decision to speak out about voting rights in Georgia but not about Xinjiang — allegedly operates a bottling plant in Xinjiang tainted by forced labor.
The sponsors have stayed in the headlines in the lead-up to the Games, but that’s not been enough to pressure them into speaking out decisively on China’s threat to human rights. Nor has it been pressure enough for NBC to abandon its multibillion-dollar contract with the IOC for exclusive broadcast rights for the Games.
“You’re an NBC executive. You’ve invested more than a billion dollars — not just for the rights fee, but beyond that, all the production fees, and travel costs, and everything else. That’s what you have invested in this,” legendary sports announcer Bob Costas recently told NR’s Jim Geraghty. Shunning the Beijing Olympics was just out of the question.
In other words, NBC has an interest in ensuring that its relationship with the IOC doesn’t sour. Although NBC announcers will do their jobs from the U.S., the network will have some journalists in Beijing — making it potentially tricky to weave coverage of China’s political situation into its coverage without putting its China-based staff in danger.
It’s also unclear whether, and how, American athletes can talk about the Chinese government’s human-rights abuses while they’re in Beijing.
According to the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin, a number of athletes are expected to skip this morning’s opening ceremony in an act of silent defiance — but silent might be all that their protest is, at least until they leave China. Yesterday, House speaker Nancy Pelosi warned athletes against speaking out and incurring the wrath of the “ruthless” Chinese government while in Beijing. If athletes were to do so openly, the reaction could be swift — and punishing. Beijing has previously held Westerners hostage to extract political concessions from their governments.
All of this — the capture of elite institutions and threats against foreigners in China for the Games — means that the Chinese Communist Party is poised to get its big moment, another opportunity to portray itself as a modern, confident, powerful player on the world stage. It will be up to all those who know better to do their part to speak out about China’s real record.
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