Michael Mazza. AEI Paper & Studies. American Enterprise Institute, 2021.
On February 4, 2022, the XXIV Olympic Winter Games will kick off with eye-popping pageantry. COVID-19-permitting, hundreds of thousands of people from around the world will descend on Beijing and pay good money to attend the opening ceremonies, where they will consume an impressive display of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda. Foreign visitors will eat Peking duck, climb the Great Wall, and watch skiing, figure skating, and bobsledding. And they will likely not spare much thought for what is transpiring in China’s far west: a slow-moving genocide that is no less horrid for its deliberate pace.
In Xinjiang, China’s northwesternmost province—a so-called autonomous region over which central authorities wield strict control—an “archipelago” of concentration camps holds around one million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities. Reports of political indoctrination, forced labor, torture, sexual violence, organ harvesting, and forced sterilizations abound. Next February, while millions of Chinese citizens across the country tune in at prime time to cheer on their country’s medal hopefuls, women in the camps will lay in their bunks as darkness falls, hoping to avoid a trip to “the dark room.” In January 2021, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a determination that the People’s Republic of China was committing ongoing crimes against humanity and genocide in Xinjiang, a finding endorsed by current Secretary of State Antony Blinken in his confirmation hearing. In the months since, the White House and State Department have made clear they see those crimes as ongoing.
The ongoing atrocities in Xinjiang may be the worst of the known abuses in China, but they are not a singular phenomenon. In Tibet, a new “system of coercive vocational training and labor transfer” resembles that seen in Xinjiang. Christians, Falun Gong practitioners, defense lawyers, activists, and dissidents of various stripes are perennial targets of persecution. The Chinese mainland plays host to an emerging panopticon in which authorities are always watching. Hong Kong has seen its freedoms nearly erased and its transformation into one of Natan Sharansky’s “fear societies” frightfully accelerated.
Meanwhile, Beijing holds foreign citizens hostage, uses deadly force along the disputed Sino-Indian frontier, and employs near-daily military intimidation against Taiwan. And a year ago, China’s mendacious mishandling of COVID-19 in its early stages all but ensured the novel corona-virus would not be contained.
In this context, Beijing will host the 2022 Olympic Games. And it is because of this context that those games must not go forward as planned.
Deja Vu
For some, Beijing 2022 may inspire deja vu. When Beijing was pursuing its bid for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, which were awarded in July 2001, China gave assurances about human rights. Liu Jingmin, then vice president of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games Bid Committee and now executive vice president of the Beijing Organising Committee for the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, said in April 2001 that in “allowing Beijing to host the Games you will help the development of human rights.” After Beijing won its 2008 bid, the secretary-general of the bid committee assured, “We are confident that the Games’ coming to China not only promotes our economy but also enhances all social conditions, including education, health, and human rights.” As Kevin Carrico, a senior research fellow at Monash University, described, those assurances came to naught.
Advertised protest zones were left empty, Internet blocks remained in place, millions were evicted, with Uyghurs in particular being racially targeted for monitoring and removal, political activists were forcefully removed from the capital, reporters were blocked from reporting, and a vicious crackdown on the Tibetan plateau and beyond was implemented in the name of “stability” for a successful Olympics.
And the world hardly batted an eye. Admittedly, pro-Tibetan protesters met the torch relay in multiple countries, perhaps most memorably in Paris, when a protester tried to wrest the Olympic torch from the hands of a wheelchair-bound Chinese torch carrier; the flame was extinguished four times on its route through the city. But Chinese abuses did not cause broadcasters and corporate sponsors to cut their ties with the games nor foreign leaders to stay away from Beijing nor spectators to cancel their trips or turn their attention elsewhere. Instead, more than two billion people worldwide tuned in for the opening ceremonies, which Steven Spielberg called “arguably the grandest spectacle of the new millennium.” That spectacle—for consumption by internal and external audiences—was clearly meant to boast, awe, and implicitly intimidate.
The 2008 Games’ slogan was “One World, One Dream.” But this clever bit of marketing could not conceal what the CCP truly had in mind: a world conducive to its continuing rule. This was a dream for China’s future that the party, and only the party, would define. Other dreams would be snuffed out with extreme prejudice. A few months after the games’ conclusion, China threw Liu Xiaobo—the author of “Charter 08,” a document urging political reform and initially signed by 303 brave Chinese citizens—into prison. Liu would win the Nobel Peace Prize while sitting in a jail cell and eventually die in custody. Liu’s treatment was but a hint of the increasingly egregious human rights abuses to come.
One Xi Jinping, One Dream
China’s “one dream” is now Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s alone: what he calls the “Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation.” As Elizabeth Economy wrote in 2018, that dream has had “concrete objectives: China should double its per-capita GDP [gross domestic product] from 2010 to 2020; it should have a military ‘capable of fighting and winning wars’; and it should meet the social welfare needs of the people.” To pursue those goals, as Economy argued, Xi has realized “a reassertion of the state in Chinese political and economic life at home, and a more ambitious and expansive role for China abroad.”
Of course, there has been a dark side to Xi’s dream. In private remarks delivered in the wake of a terrorist attack in 2014, Xi called for showing “absolutely no mercy.” Two years later, he appointed the hardline Chen Quanguo as party chief in Xinjiang. Chen soon set about ordering subordinates to “round up everyone who should be rounded up.” One of those subordinates, Wang Yongzhi, later called on party members to “wipe them out completely…. Destroy them root and branch.” In a September 2020 speech, several years into his campaign against the Uyghurs, Xi asserted that “Xinjiang is enjoying a favorable setting of social stability with the people living in peace and contentment” and that “the facts have abundantly demonstrated that our national minority work has been a success.” Chillingly, he described the party’s Xinjiang policy as “totally correct” and ordered that “it must be held to for the long term.”
Foreign observers cannot dismiss the abuses in Xinjiang as resulting from local policy gone astray. China’s central leadership is directly—and personally—responsible.
Foreign observers cannot dismiss the abuses in Xinjiang as resulting from local policy gone astray. China’s central leadership is directly—and personally—responsible. Atrocities are not simply occurring on Xi’s watch, but at his direction. Xi is likewise responsible for civil society’s shrinking space, the suffocating human rights environment nationwide and increasingly in Hong Kong, and China’s bolder assertiveness beyond its borders. These trends largely preceded Xi’s rise to power, but he has accelerated them. Leveraging the Olympics to censure China provides a way to object to those trends and the specifics of Xi’s leadership.
Why Target the Olympics?
Reasons the Olympics should not go forward in Beijing next year fall into two broad categories: (1) participant health and safety and (2) accountability.
Participant Health and Safety. Practically speaking, and in light of recent events, there is little reason to trust that Chinese authorities can ensure the health and well-being of Olympic athletes, officials, journalists, and spectators. The public health failures in China were significant in late 2019 and early 2020, with national censorship directives exacerbating the efforts by local and provincial leaders to minimize or cover up the extent of the outbreak in Wuhan. There is little reason to expect more transparency if there were a brewing crisis ahead of a major international event; the opposite is arguably more likely. There are few reasons to trust China in this regard.
Nor are health threats the only hazards athletes and other visitors will face. Should they choose to use devices while in China, their personal data will not be remotely secure. Communications and online activities will be observed, recorded, and tucked away for potential future use. Olympic athletes may be willing to pay that price for a shot at a medal, but they should not have to.
Lastly, given that Beijing has, of late, started holding foreign citizens hostage, other countries should be wary of sending large numbers of potential captives to China. While using Olympic athletes for hostage diplomacy would seem a bridge too far even for the CCP, countries such as Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom should consider whether they will need to temper their approaches to China in the lead-up to the next Winter Games to reduce risk for members of their national Olympic teams. Better to not have to make such calculations.
Accountability. The United States has led the charge in calling out China for its crimes in Xinjiang—namely, by formally designating those crimes a genocide. The United States has likewise played a leading role in countering disinformation regarding COVID-19’s origins and Beijing’s handling of the crisis. The new Joe Biden administration has maintained a persistent rhetorical drumbeat, criticizing China for its human rights abuses, economic practices, and pressure on Taiwan. Words, however, are insufficient for holding perpetrators accountable for their misdeeds.
From sanctions to economic statecraft to visa restrictions, the United States has numerous ways to levy costs in the international arena. Beijing’s forthcoming Olympics, however, provide a unique opportunity to impose consequences on China’s leadership.
Beijing’s forthcoming Olympics provide a unique opportunity to impose consequences on China’s leadership.
For Beijing, the Olympics are no simple sporting event. In January, according to Xinhua, Xi said, “Hosting an excellent 2022 Games is a major task of the Party and the country, and it is a solemn commitment to the international community.” He also described the Winter Games as “an event of great significance at the outset of the 14th Five-Year Plan period from 2021 to 2025.” Xi has made clear the party’s responsibility for the Olympics’ success, and he has explicitly tied the games to a major domestic policy initiative.
Like his predecessor, Xi intends to use the games to shore up his own domestic legitimacy and impress on the wider world China’s power and supposed beneficence. In 2016, Xi explained that “an extraordinary Winter Olympics will further showcase China’s achievements in reform and opening-up as well as its efforts in promoting the peace and development of all of humanity.” Xi looks forward to February 2022, expecting that the Olympics will be a great success, for which the party, under his leadership, will take credit.
But there is still time to rewrite that narrative. The United States and like-minded partners could deprive Xi of that victory lap and instead put him on the defensive. Rather than reaping the awards of a successful Olympics—an exploitable ballooning of Chinese nationalism, enhanced domestic legitimacy, international plaudits, and renewed confidence to act with impunity at home and abroad—Xi would be grappling with a significant public failure. And although the CCP’s propaganda apparatus would likely lean hard into a victimization narrative (and successfully shape public opinion), CCP elites would see an embarrassment for the party and China, domestically and internationally. They would see billions of dollars wasted on what essentially amounted to a failed vanity project (for Xi and China), and some, perhaps many, would assess that such an outcome was not a foregone conclusion. Rather than bask in the afterglow of a “fantastic, extraordinary and excellent” Olympics, Xi and his cronies might have to mount a rearguard action in the party’s upper ranks.
Meanwhile, a campaign to cancel or move the Olympics will require a public relations effort that will bring widespread attention to China’s many maleficent behaviors, including its human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Tibet, its culpability in failing to contain COVID-19, its hostage diplomacy, and its near-daily military intimidation of Taiwan. A campaign waged successfully against Beijing 2022 will mean China suffered an international public relations disaster in which governments and citizenries alike turned against the People’s Republic of China and did so in a realm—international sport—that is supposed to be, in theory, apolitical. A diminution in Chinese international influence would seem unlikely to be limited to sports. Forcing Beijing to spend capital—political and actual—to regain some of that influence fittingly, though insufficiently, holds Beijing accountable for its many misdeeds.
How to Leverage the Olympics
Arguably the easiest course for the United States is to pursue a boycott. Although a boycott of the Beijing 2022 Games would be most impactful as a multicountry effort—perhaps along with parallel “freedom games”—the United States can also act alone. The US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, not the US government, technically has the power to decide to skip the games, but Congress and the administration, alongside public pressure, could make participation untenable.
Despite a boycott’s relative ease, however, there are notable drawbacks. Not most importantly, but worth consideration, a boycott would effectively punish American athletes, depriving many of what will likely be their one chance to compete at an Olympics. Many would consider that a large price to pay, especially as China would maintain its role as Olympic host. Even with a significant boycott, China’s foreign friends and partners (and clients) would still show up for the games, making it easier to manage any public relations fallout for Beijing.
A multicountry boycott would be embarrassing for Xi, but it would be far less effective than stripping Beijing of the games entirely would be. That should be the goal, with the 2022 Olympics postponed and relocated. This is no easy task, but it is entirely within the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) contractual rights to terminate its agreement with Beijing. The Host City Contract states the following:
The IOC shall be entitled to terminate this Contract and to withdraw the Games from the City, the NOC [national Olympic committee] and the OCOG [Organising Committee of the Olympic Games] if: i. the Host Country is at any time, whether before the scheduled commencement of the Games or during the Games, in a state of war, civil disorder, boycott, embargo decreed by the international community or in a situation officially recognised as one of belligerence or if the IOC has reasonable grounds to believe, in its sole discretion, that the safety of participants in the Games would be seriously threatened or jeopardised for any reason whatsoever … iv. there is a violation by the City, the NOC or the OCOG of any material obligation pursuant to this Contract, the Olympic Charter or under any applicable law. (Emphasis added.)
As discussed above, China’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak in late 2019 and early 2020 makes clear that China is not a safe place to hold an Olympics. For the IOC to suggest otherwise is preposterous. Whether the IOC could cancel the Olympics because Beijing, the Chinese Olympic Committee, or the Beijing Organising Committee violated the Olympic Charter is trickier. Clearly, the national government and CCP have done so. The Olympic Charter includes the following “Fundamental Principles of Olympism”:
- Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.
- The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity….
- The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practising sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play. (Emphasis added.)
The CCP, especially under Xi’s leadership, evinces no “respect for universal fundamental ethical principles,” is an enemy of human dignity, and has denied more than a quarter of the Uyghurs in China—who have spent time in a concentration camp without being charged with or convicted of a crime—the right to practice sport. The Chinese Olympic Committee, the Beijing Organising Committee, and the city of Beijing may not be responsible for China’s failure to abide by the Olympic Charter (though Liu Peng, who heads the Chinese Olympic Committee and Beijing Organising Committee, is a member of the CCP’s Central Committee and thus complicit in its many transgressions). But going forward with the games will nonetheless make a mockery of the charter, “Olympism,” and the Olympic Movement.
In sum, to save the Olympics from the genocidal leaders who would use the games to serve their own narrow ends, the IOC should be looking hard for a way to terminate the Host City Contract for the 2022 Games and find a new host. The postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics due to the pandemic shows that the IOC is capable of flexibility and that the sky will not fall if the games do not occur as scheduled.
Unfortunately, by all accounts, the IOC is content to go forward with Beijing 2022—despite China’s genocide in Xinjiang, shackling of Hong Kong, yearslong and ongoing detention of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, repeated military intimidation of other IOC members, and culpability for the global pandemic. Indeed, the IOC has actively opposed talk of a potential boycott.
NGOs and governments alike should work on educating athletes about Chinese human rights abuses and potential threats to personal safety and security in China.
If there is any hope of the IOC moving to strip Beijing of the next Winter Olympics, a concerted pressure campaign—ideally involving governments, civil society, corporations, and athletes—will be necessary. First, the Biden administration should begin rallying other Winter Olympic heavyweights to demand the IOC relocate the 2022 Games. Half the top 10 all-time Winter Olympic medal winners are NATO members (Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United States). Two more are EU members (Austria and Sweden). The top 20 also include Finland, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the as-of-late plucky Czech Republic. If one includes medals won by East and West Germany, those 14 countries account for 75 percent of all Olympic medals ever awarded for winter sports. Should even half publicly demand the IOC move the games and postpone them as necessary—some of those countries should offer to collectively host the 2022 Olympics in Beijing’s stead—the pressure on the IOC would be significant.
But pressure on the IOC should not come from governments alone. Civil society also has a role. Congress and the State Department should ensure that human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have the resources they need to educate the public and aspiring members of Team USA about Chinese abuses, draft prominent individuals into an effort to raise awareness and lobby the IOC and national Olympic bodies, and launch letterwriting campaigns targeting American members of the IOC, IOC President Thomas Bach, and current and potential Olympic corporate sponsors. Ideally, NGOs would also launch similar initiatives in other countries, with government support if necessary.
NGOs and governments alike should work on educating athletes about Chinese human rights abuses and potential threats to personal safety and security in China. In fall 2020, the bipartisan American Values and Security in International Athletics Act passed in the US House of Representatives. The act requires the secretary of state to provide briefing materials on human rights abuses and security concerns to athletes representing the United States at international competitions in Communist countries. The bill, which was never taken up by the Senate, offered a creative way to, ideally, begin building grassroots support in the athletic community for relocating the 2022 Olympics. But the State Department need not wait for a new law to launch such an initiative. It should do so now and seek to convert Olympic hopefuls into vocal partners rather than potential adversaries.
Congress also has a role in complementing NGO efforts to hold corporations accountable for sponsoring an Olympics amid genocide. American corporate sponsors include Airbnb, Coca-Cola Company, Intel Corporation, Mars, Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, Proctor & Gamble, and Visa. NBC has the broadcast rights. Congressional hearings, with executives invited to testify, should examine whether and how US businesses incorporate human rights considerations into sponsorship decisions. Congressional attention to the NBA in the wake of Daryl Morey’s “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong” tweet was effective in encouraging the league to adopt an at least rhetorically pro-freedom approach to the crisis. How much more effective might such attention be when corporations are poised to be forever linked to what may become known as the “Genocide Olympics”?
The Olympic Games and Great-Power Competition
The Biden team has embraced the competition framework for conceptualizing relations with China. The administration’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance describes an agenda that will “allow us to prevail in strategic competition with China or any other nation.” At a press briefing in early February, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said, “Strategic competition is the frame through which we see that relationship [with China],” and President Biden told CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell that there would be “extreme competition” with China. Three days prior, during remarks at the State Department, Biden described China as “our most serious competitor”—one that is challenging “our prosperity, security, and democratic values.” The new president avowed: “We’ll confront China’s economic abuses; counter its aggressive, coercive action; to push back on China’s attack on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance.”
In leading a fight to strip China of the next Winter Games, the United States can advance some of these goals. Most obviously, a successful effort would be the most significant consequence China has faced for its human rights abuses since the United States and its allies instituted an arms embargo in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre. It would likewise represent the most strident collective response to Beijing’s turn toward external hostility in recent years and to its wildly irresponsible approach to the coronavirus outbreak in 2019. On its face, that response would be symbolic, but it could come with real domestic costs for Xi.
Generally speaking, the United States and its like-minded partners have limited wherewithal to directly influence domestic power politics in China, but the scheduled events of 2022 may provide a rare opportunity to encourage Chinese elites to productively reevaluate current leadership. The Beijing Olympics in February will serve as just one bookend during an eventful year in China. The other is the 20th Party Congress, normally held in the fall. Had Xi not successfully centralized leadership during the past nine years and removed constraints on his staying in power beyond a 10-year time frame, the 20th Party Congress would mark the beginning of a leadership transition in China.
Ambitious party elites may wish that was still the case. Although there have long been reports of dissatisfaction with Xi among the party’s upper ranks, little evidence suggests cadres might act on their discontent. The lead-up to the 20th Party Congress, however, will present the next opportunity for a leadership challenge. Remote as that possibility may seem, the aftermath of a successful effort to strip China of the Winter Olympics could interact with the fallout of Xi’s early missteps during the coronavirus crisis, ongoing economic difficulties stemming partly from the global pandemic, and long-brewing intraparty rivalries and grievances, to create a storm Xi might find difficult to ride out.
While growing repression and rising assertiveness preceded Xi’s ascension to power, he has accelerated those trends in ways that were not preordained.
The United States should take advantage of this strategic opportunity. Although Xi is no enigma—he is, after all, a product of the CCP—he is unique. While growing repression and rising assertiveness preceded Xi’s ascension to power, he has accelerated those trends in ways that were not preordained. The United States should not bother seeking to empower reformers in the CCP’s upper echelons—an effort that would likely prove folly—but rather should convince Xi’s rivals that the current direction of Chinese policy is counterproductive. Admittedly, there is likely no going back to “hide and bide.” But if the United States can take steps that encourage members of the Central Committee to assess that Xi’s brutality at home and his belligerence abroad are more likely to arrest China’s rise than secure it, a course correction—whether under Xi or a theoretical successor—becomes more likely.
The United States would still have significant differences with a China that is less egregious in its domestic abuses and more restrained in its external dealings, but competition would be less heated. The United States and others concerned with the nature of China’s rise should not let pass an opportunity to nudge Beijing in such a direction.
Dispelling Counterarguments
There are a number of counterarguments to the recommendation that the 2022 Winter Olympics should not go forward as scheduled. Perhaps the most common argument is that the Olympics are and should remain apolitical. Bach, president of the IOC, has made this case recently, including in the Guardian in October 2020.
The Olympic Games are not about politics. The International Olympic Committee, as a civil non-governmental organisation, is strictly politically neutral at all times … The Olympic Games cannot prevent wars and conflicts. Nor can they address all the political and social challenges in our world. But they can set an example for a world where everyone respects the same rules and one another. They can inspire us to solve problems in friendship and solidarity. They can build bridges leading to better understanding among people. In this way, they can open the door to peace.
Bach apparently fails to understand that the ultimate goal he espouses—uniting the world in peace, as he puts it—is explicitly political. Politics are, in some ways, always front and center at the Olympics, with each display of a flag and every time a national anthem is played being a political act.
Additionally, the IOC has not been “strictly politically neutral” throughout its history, as Bach claims. He scorns the very idea of a boycott because the 1980 Olympic Games boycott hurt athletes while failing to make the Soviet Union withdraw from Afghanistan, but he ignores entirely the case of South Africa. First banned from an Olympics in 1964 due to apartheid—in particular, due to discrimination in sport—South Africa was evicted from the IOC in 1971. The IOC did not welcome South Africa back to the Olympics until the 1992 Barcelona Games, when apartheid was ending. The Olympic ban was only one pillar of the broader international campaign against apartheid—which also included diplomatic and economic pressure—but it preceded significant international efforts.
In 1994, Nelson Mandela explained why he attended a soccer match not long after becoming president: “I wanted my people to know that I became president sooner because of the sacrifices made by our athletes during the years of the boycott.” In the case of South Africa, does Bach regret that the IOC stood on principle? That the IOC used what leverage it had to encourage changes to a sovereign country’s unjust legal framework? That the IOC took concrete action to, as the Olympic Charter states, advance “respect for universal fundamental ethical principles,” ensure “the preservation of human dignity,” and defend the right to practice sport “without discrimination of any kind”?
The Olympic Movement is, fundamentally, a political movement. Its lofty goals are political goals. Its custodians have used it to pursue political ends. Cities and countries seek hosting rights for political reasons. To suggest “the Olympic Games are not about politics” is quixotic at best, possibly naive, and disingenuous at worst.
A second counterargument is that stripping China of the games (or boycotting them) will not cause China to change course. Certainly, Xi will not halt atrocities in Xinjiang in March 2022 if the Beijing Olympics are canceled. At least a year ago, the United States and other like-minded states should have threatened to boycott the games or pursue their cancellation if China did not, at a minimum, close the concentration camps. It would have been worth a try. Unfortunately, it is too late for such an effort.
At this point, the immediate goal of using the games as leverage should not be salvation for the Uyghurs—not because such a goal is not worthwhile, but rather because it is unrealistic in the short term. There is no time to organize a multinational effort, issue an ultimatum, give China an opportunity to meet demands, and follow through if it does not. As discussed above, stripping China of the Olympics to hold it accountable for its many wrongdoings aims to encourage a longer-term shift in Chinese behavior as party elites reassess Xi’s leadership. Successfully denying China the games, moreover, will set a hugely significant precedent: that the United States can and will exercise international leadership and expend political capital to take on one of the world’s most powerful countries, largely due to human rights concerns.
A third counterargument to this recommended course is that, if Xi does face significant domestic challenges, he could lash out. Internally, Xi could opt for even harsher repression, further shrinking available space for public criticism. An attempt to hold the Chinese leadership accountable for its human rights abuses could, ironically, lead to more and worse abuses. Externally, Xi could act more aggressively, perhaps welcoming a crisis in the Taiwan Strait or elsewhere as a way to unify the party.
The Biden administration should make clear that, if Xi launches a new crackdown on dissent in the wake of losing the Olympics, the United States will be prepared to act.
The United States should be ready to dissuade Xi from either course of action. Washington likely has additional means of making life even more difficult for China’s senior leadership as it heads toward the 20th Party Congress in later 2022. The Biden administration should make clear that, if Xi launches a new crackdown on dissent in the wake of losing the Olympics, the United States will be prepared to act—for example, by releasing intelligence reports on the wealth amassed by Central Committee members and their families. To discourage Xi from provoking an external crisis, the Biden administration should continue to clarify the US security commitment to Taiwan; ensure intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets are optimally postured to deny China strategic and tactical surprise in the Indo-Pacific region; and coordinate signaling among allies and “Quad” partners to encourage Chinese perceptions of a united front on its periphery.
Conclusion
Since July 2015, when Beijing’s bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics succeeded, China has ignored a ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which it is treaty-bound to respect, regarding the South China Sea; launched a years long pressure campaign on Taiwan designed to limit its international engagement, undermine its democratic institutions, and intimidate its people into submission; rounded up more than 300 civil rights lawyers at the start of an ongoing crackdown; locked up Kovrig and Spavor to pressure the Canadian government to interfere with ongoing legal proceedings; obliterated existing freedoms in Hong Kong, again in contravention of an international treaty; made crimes against humanity and genocide of the Uyghur people state policy in Xinjiang; and, thanks to a combination of malign neglect and intentional mendacity, unleashed a world-changing pandemic that has thus far resulted in 2.8 million deaths.
Despite all that and more, Olympic teams worldwide are still expected to descend on Beijing next February. Wittingly or not, they will play bit parts in a grand propaganda spectacle, one that may feature smiling (persecuted) minorities, a heroic retelling of China’s response to the novel coronavirus, and a message that China’s power is now an immutable feature of the international system.
That none of this seems to bother the IOC is a moral stain on the institution and the men and women who sit on the committee. And make no mistake, every country that sends a team to Beijing will be complicit in China’s worst abuses. If the games are to be relocated—if the Olympic Movement is to avoid repeating the mistake of 1936-unrelenting pressure on the IOC and corporate sponsors should begin now. Xi has taken the potentially fateful step of unintentionally providing the international community with the leverage it needs to hold him and his fellow leaders accountable for their many sins. Better make the most of it.