The Republican congressman John Katko issued an unequivocal statement last week explaining his stance on the Winter Olympics. He accused China of “actively committing genocide” and described the idea that a Games in Beijing next year as “untenable”.
Katko believes that the United States should push for the Games to be moved to another country in light of the treatment of the Uighur minority in the Xinjiang province, who are being sent to “re-education” camps in their millions by the Chinese government. “The world is watching our next move,” he said.
That may be true but in recent days onlookers may not have been entirely sure what they were seeing. On Tuesday, the US state department spokesman Ned Price said that the Biden administration was indeed considering a boycott, adding that it was something that they were hoping to discuss with their international allies in the hope of reaching “a coordinated approach”. A few hours later, a state department official contradicted Price. “We have not discussed and are not discussing any joint boycott,” they said.
It is not yet clear which statement will prove to be true but, with less than a year to go, this is the latest indication that major global powers are weighing up their options and the clearest signal yet of the potential for action. There have already been similar debates in Canada and here in the UK, where politicians including the former Conservative party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Labour’s Chris Bryant MP, and the Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey have all raised the issue. Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, said in October that it “may not be possible” to separate politics from sport in this case, although the prime minister has rejected calls for a boycott.
President Joe Biden’s stance has been complicated in recent weeks by his support for Major League Baseball (MLB), which announced a boycott of the state of Georgia in condemnation of the state’s new voting laws, which some say will disproportionately affect black voters. Biden is critical of the laws, describing them as “pernicious”. The MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said that the organisation opposed restrictions on voting rights and, as a result, has stripped Georgia of the All Star Game in July, which Biden said was “reassuring”.
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In an opinion article last weekend, The Wall Street Journal pointed out that this stance had put Biden in a bit of a bind. “We can’t wait to see what the US president is going to say about China’s voting rules,” they wrote. “Perhaps Mr Biden can compare the voting rules in Georgia to those in the re-education camps in Xinjiang.”
Time is running out for countries to commit to an athletic boycott, not least as qualification has already begun. Politicians are increasingly queasy about denying athletes the right to compete, particularly at events such as the Olympics, which require years of training and can have an enormous impact on an athlete’s income and livelihood. High-profile Olympic committees in the US, UK and Canada have all spoken out strongly against a boycott.
This is not the only option on the table. For the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, Barack Obama’s administration sent a carefully selected delegation to the opening ceremony, which did not include Obama nor then-vice president Biden, but did include two openly gay athletes, Billie Jean King and Caitlin Cahow, in an act of defiance against Russia’s stance on homosexuality. It was interpreted as an effective snub to Vladimir Putin.
This kind of diplomatic boycott, whereby countries refuse to send high-ranking officials, may be the best option left. In the autumn, Raab was asked whether the UK government would encourage Prince William to attend the Beijing Games.
The foreign secretary responded that this would be considered in line with “whatever further decisions we come to”.
