In August 2008, Rev. Patrick Mahoney came to Beijing.
He walked with two activists to Tiananmen Square and opened a banner in front of the Mao Memorial Hall to protest Beijing’s human rights record and to oppose the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
Twice taken away by police and facing charges of disturbing public order, he thought he was going to spend six months in a Chinese prison, and six days later, on August 7, 2008, his Chinese visa was stamped “deportation” and he boarded a plane back to Los Angeles to never set foot in China again.
“The thing that struck me the most was when we opened the banner in Tiananmen Square and people looked at us with wide eyes, like a space ship landed in Tiananmen and a bunch of aliens came out,” Pastor Mahaney told Voice of America, “and you could feel that people hadn’t seen that before. , that’s someone demonstrating in a public place with a different opinion than the government.”
When Beijing hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics, many people, like Pastor Mahaney, expected that international attention would improve the human rights situation in China.
“At the Time, we saw the 2008 Olympics as a unique opportunity to confront the human rights situation in China in an international arena and to show the world what was happening in China,” he said.
However, that expectation was dashed, and now, 13 years later, Beijing’s human rights record has deteriorated further. Human Rights Watch’s 2020 World Human Rights Report says the Chinese government’s authoritarianism was on full display in 2020 as it wrestled with the new crown virus that erupted from Wuhan. At the same time, the government further intensified its repression of dissidents in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong.
China will host the Winter Olympics in February 2022. This time, however, the world’s attitude toward China has taken a 180-degree turn. No one thinks hosting the Olympics in China changes their behavior.
Republicans in the U.S. Congress have taken several actions. Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL), who introduced a resolution calling on the International Olympic Committee to move the games, said in an exclusive interview with the Voice of America that he could not agree to give Beijing, a human rights violator, the honor and benefit of hosting the Olympics.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced a new cross-party bill on Feb. 23 to inform U.S. Olympians about the risks posed to human rights and personal security by Olympic host countries. Another Republican, Rep. John Katko (R-NY), urged President Biden to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing in response to China’s genocide of the predominantly Muslim Uighur and other ethnic and religious minority groups.
In early February, more than 180 human rights groups called on governments to boycott the Beijing 2022 Olympics in protest of China’s ongoing crackdown on ethnic minorities.
No country has yet announced that it will boycott the Beijing Olympics. The official position of the International Olympic Committee is that the body is an international sporting body and is not political.
In response to calls for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics, the IOC quoted an anonymous spokesman as saying the body “does not have the power or the ability to change the legal or political system of a sovereign country.”
Daryl Adair, an associate professor in the Department of Sports Management at the University of Technology Sydney, told the Voice of America that the IOC needs to ensure that the Olympic hosts respond correctly to the Olympic spirit.
“Would the IOC, for example, agree to let Myanmar, a country that has violated the human rights of the Rohingya and is now going through a military mutiny, host the Olympics?” He asked rhetorically.
Unless Beijing can prove that the allegations are unfounded, the calls to boycott the 2022 Beijing Olympics will continue, Adiel said. “It is inevitable that the IOC will also face this question that it does not want to answer,” he said.
Jules Boykoff, a political science professor at Pacific University, is also an Olympian who served on the U.S. Olympic soccer team from 1989 to 1992.
He told Voice of America that “the Chinese government’s approach to the Uighurs in Xinjiang and its crackdown on pro-democracy activities in Hong Kong are in huge conflict with the principles in the Olympic charter.”
Rev. Mahaney said the international community’s efforts now are a world away from what they were in 2008.
“In 2008, we were essentially alone and there was no international consensus at all,” he said, “and now the momentum is full. We’re communicating with members of Congress, we’re communicating with world leaders.”
However, there are experts who oppose the boycott. Canadian Dick Pound, the most senior official of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), said that boycotting the Olympics is “something we all know has no impact.”
“The Olympics are not China’s Olympics, they are international,” he told the BBC, adding that “granting a country the right to host does not mean agreeing with the policies of that government.”
David Lampton, a U.S. professor who has been hailed by China as the No. 1 “know-it-all” on the Olympics, also took a stand against the boycott. In an opinion piece, he said the Chinese would not see the boycott as a show of solidarity with minorities and the oppressed. “They will see it as an attack on the Chinese, their people and their civilization, and will see it as an attempt to embarrass China rather than consult with it,” he wrote in Newsweek (New Week), adding that “it would be counterproductive to set off national sentiment.” He believes the best way for the U.S. to compete with China is to deal with U.S. domestic issues and once again show the world the immense power of the United States.
For its part, Beijing, state-run media Global Times wrote in early February that “Beijing will severely punish those who boycott the Olympics.” At the same time, Beijing is actively preparing to apply for the right to host the 2032 Olympics.
Recent Comments