The scene is set for the Winter Olympics in Beijing next year. President Xi has ceremonially inspected the venues and taken a trip on the new high-speed Beijing-Zhangjiakou rail line.
But while Vladimir Putin has confirmed his attendance, the US, Australia – and now the UK — have all announced that they will not be sending any ministers or officials to Beijing for the games. There is no doubt in my mind that a diplomatic boycott is the right decision.
Back in March 2020, as a newly elected MP, I was the first to call for the UK to boycott the Winter Olympics in China. At that time the appalling evidence of mass incarceration, torture, rape, disappearances, surveillance and forced labour was already extensive.
The Beijing winter games will mark two years on, and during that time a wave of authoritarian repression has crashed and been felt across the world spanning the Covid-19 cover-up, the crackdown in Hong Kong, military incursions against the Taiwanese and even further evidence of human rights abuses in Tibet and the genocide in Xinjiang.
The current situation in Xinjiang meets the definition of genocide. More than one million Uighurs have been locked up in re-education camps for crimes as innocuous as browsing a foreign website.
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Thousands of families have been forcibly separated and children put into indoctrination orphanages. There is credible evidence of widespread rape and torture.
Human rights abuses are not just confined to Xinjiang. Tens of thousands of people in China have been locked up for months and then rushed through a legal system with a 99.7 per cent conviction rate. The UN calls it enforced disappearance.
This authoritarian repression stems right from the top. President Xi called China’s policies in Xinjiang “completely correct”. Yet despite this bleak human rights picture, as things stand, the world’s leaders will be trotted down a red carpet, embracing China’s leaders, all under the guise that sport is apolitical.
Yet the reality is that sport — and especially the Olympics – is inherently political. And the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) certainly sees it that way.
After the tennis player Peng Shuai spoke out about her experience of sexual assault at the hands of a top-ranking CCP official, she disappeared. It was only after the likes of Serena Williams and the Women’s Tennis Association raised concern that state media broadcast suspicious photos and videos to prove her “safety”.
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This video should be viewed with suspicion, like the videos the Chinese regime has released time after time when it kidnaps and imprisons its own citizens. Beijing treats its own Olympians as pawns in a political game.
The last Olympics to be held in China, back in 2008, was one giant propaganda campaign. An Olympics propaganda bureau directed positive state media coverage, with a ban on negative stories.
The head of Beijing’s Olympics committee was Liu Peng, who spent five years as deputy director in the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department. The opening ceremony was even signed off by China’s Politburo Standing Committee, the most powerful group in Chinese politics.
There is a reason that countries such as China will pay £30 billion to host the Olympic Games. It’s a price worth paying to wash your reputation on the global stage.
For those who argue that Olympic boycotts don’t work, it is true that history shows Olympic boycotts have rarely directly led to any meaningful change in behaviour by autocratic regimes.
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But what a boycott does is initiate a debate, force human rights to be in the spotlight and give a voice to all those who the CCP are seeking to silence.
We have a duty to do all we can to limit the worst excesses of their human rights abuses, and at least acknowledge survivors and all they’ve faced. To be a voice for those who others seek to silence. A boycott marks the CCP’s actions as anathema, driving up the cost of their actions.
So, as well as not sending officials, we should not participate in the fanfare of the opening or closing ceremonies, beyond one representative carrying our Union flag.
We should discourage our athletes and great British businesses from participating in blatant propaganda efforts in the country. And we should also be pushing for freedom of expression for athletes to be protected, and the Olympics Rule 50 respected and upheld during the 2022 Winter Olympics.
I hope that our incredible British athletes, proudly wearing our flag and all the values that it stands for, smash their previous records and take home an impressive haul of medals.
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But the prime minister’s decision to confirm a diplomatic boycott is absolutely the right one. It would have been unthinkable to carry on as usual by lending our support to the CCP’s prize propaganda performance while knowing China is committing a genocide against its own people.
Alicia Kearns is MP for Rutland and Melton