Olympics diplomacy versus boycott

The Winter Olympics hosted by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) which are currently underway amidst fanfare they face two challenges. The first is the global pandemic COVID-19 and its multiple variants, while the second is political in nature.

On the eve of the grand international event, in December 2021, the US, under the Biden administration, announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. Washington DC cited reasons to be PRC’s alleged ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses. The boycott did not constrain the US Olympics Team from competing in various events but the US officials and diplomats were prohibited from attending the event. China responded angrily, accusing the United States of actions that “politicize sports, create divisions and provoke confrontation,” in a statement by the spokesperson of the Chinese Mission to the United Nations.

The boycott is in sharp contrast to the First Lady Jill Biden leading the US delegation to the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics; Vice President Mike Pence and Mrs. Pence represented the United States at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games in South Korea during the Trump administration; First Lady Michelle Obama led the delegation to the 2012 London Summer Games; and President George W. Bush attended the 2008 Beijing Summer Games.

This is not the first time that the card of sports diplomacy has been used, albeit to negative results. Going as far back as the 1936 Olympics, Adolf Hitler used the platform as a stage to promote Aryan nationalism for Germany with his ideological belief of racial supremacy. The Olympics were used as a method of hardening the German spirit and instilling unity among German youth. It was also believed that sport was a “way to weed out the weak, Jewish and other undesirables.” As a result, many Jews and Gypsies were banned from participating in sporting events. While Germany did top the medal table, the Nazi depiction of ethnic Africans as inferior was dispelled by Jesse Owens’ gold medals in the 100 meters, 200 meters, 4×100 meters relay and long jump events.

In the case of apartheid, sport was used to isolate South Africa and bring about a major overhaul in the country’s social structure. While ethnicity, race, social class and more can cause division, the spirit of competition in sports is also said to help overcome differences.

The Biden boycott explicitly does not bar the U.S. athletes from participating. This reflects lessons well-learned from the 1980 Carter administration boycott of the Moscow Summer Games due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which destroyed the Olympic dreams of many US athletes. In the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, the Soviet Bloc led a retaliatory boycott of the games in response to the American-led Moscow games boycott. In 2014, the United States, France, and Germany did not send high-ranking officials to the Sochi Olympics in Russia.

Readers may recall that it was sports that brought the US and PRC closer. In the 1970s, an exchange of table tennis players from the United States and the People’s Republic of China led to a thaw in Sino-American relations that eventually resulted in the US President Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with China.

Britain, Australia, India and Canada joined the diplomatic boycott. In July 2021, the European Parliament passed a nonbinding resolution calling for diplomatic officials to boycott China’s Olympics without “verifiable improvement in the human rights situation in Hong Kong, the Xinjiang Uyghur Region, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and elsewhere in China.”

Noticeably, the US allies like South Korea, Germany, Italy, and France have not honoured the boycott. The latter two have been critical of China’s human rights record in the past, but because they are hosting the next Olympics (Paris in 2024 and Milano Cortina in 2026), they may want to avoid retaliation by China, which has said the United States “will pay a price for its erroneous actions.”

It is ironic that the US as well as Europe have a dismal track record of abuse of human rights. The “Black Lives Matter” movement in the US bears testimony to the fact that it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Independent analysts opine that the US-led boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics is not about human rights, but the result of a trade war between the two economic giants. The jury is still out in the case of the alleged maltreatment of the Uighurs in China, but Beijing has invited the Occident to visit the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China to judge for themselves whether the Uighurs are living in squalor and abject poverty or not. Beijing did well to pick an athlete of Uighur heritage, cross-country skier Dinigeer Yilamujiang, to light the Olympic flame at the opening ceremony of the games.

China refuses to be cowed, as it has hosted a spectacular event like it did in 2008, except that then it was neither threatened by sports diplomacy nor COVID-19. Beijing’s traditional allies, Pakistan, Russia and others joined the dazzling opening ceremony to express their solidarity with the PRC.

The writer is a former Group Captain PAF and an author