China Winter Olympics Boycott
Doing Something, or Much Ado About Nothing?
On Monday Joe Biden announced a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in China come February. The stated reasons for the boycott included allegations of genocide and other human rights violations. As of Wednesday afternoon Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia announced similar actions.
Biden was thinking of the treatment of the Muslim Uighur minority in announcing the boycott, no doubt, but he could have referenced the murderous occupation and annexation of Tibet in 1950, or the mountains of dead linked to the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and 1970s.
More recently, there was the Chinese government’s silencing of local scientists who first sought to sound the alarm about what came to be known as Covid-19; this was followed by barring any serious World Health Organization investigation into the origins of the virus we now know as SARS-CoV-2. (Note that I am taking no position on how the pandemic originated, only repeating what the Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has himself said: we need a further investigation.)
Then there are the extreme security laws that have been imposed on Hong Kong and China’s repeated penetration of Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone – China is still playing hardball.
In addition to the above highly publicized events and epochs, a recent study by Reporters Without Borders, an international organization founded in 1985, 127 journalists were detained in China in a period from 2019 to 2021. This was in addition to forced indoctrination of all other approved journalists, such as having to study Xi Jinping’s “thought.”
Yet, there is undeniable evidence of progress in China. In 1990, about 750 million Chinese lived in “extreme poverty.” By 2016, the last year for which World Bank figures are available, only 7.2 million Chinese were living in “extreme poverty,” all according to a BBC report earlier this year. To be sure, the definition of “extreme poverty” is extremely low itself ($2.30 a day, adjusted for inflation over time) but clearly there has been progress.
The growth of the Chinese economy overall has been tremendously impressive (in part due to Western capital’s lust for more profits and the Western consumer’s addiction to low-priced goods of varying quality). From 1979, when “liberalization” began, through 2018, China’s Gross Domestic Product grew by an average of 9.5 percent each year. To really understand that growth, just think of how much money you’d have if in 1979 you’d salted away $10,000 in a savings account at 9.5 percent interest, paid monthly, by 2018. (I used an online calculator and came up with $440,556.)
And, to be fair, Xi Jinping’s recent pronouncements have called for more economic justice for all Chinese, not a system that largely benefits the most successful entrepreneurs.
Is the Boycott Justified?
I’m not prepared to compare the Communist Party of China to the Nazis, or Xi Jinping to Adolph Hitler, but the suppression of minorities, whether or not we call it genocide, the oftentimes highly nationalist rhetoric, and the clearly expansionist foreign policy are highly reminiscent of the thousand year Reich that Hitler promised. That the Chinese want to show off their prowess in the upcoming Olympics is hardly unique, but it was what Hitler also wanted in the 1936 Summer Olympics, isn’t it?
So, was Biden’s boycott justified? I say yes, unless one argues it’s too weak. Certainly, the boycott or boycotts are not going to change China’s behavior in the near term. But maybe it’s a start.