China less worried about global criticism these Olympics

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When Beijing received the 2008 Summer Olympics, the International Olympic Committee predicted that the Games could improve human rights, and Chinese politicians hinted at the same.

Such discussion is virtually absent this time around as the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics open in just over a week.

The Games are a reminder of both China’s rise and its disregard for civil liberties, which prompted a diplomatic boycott led by the United States.

Rights groups have documented forced labor, mass detentions and torture, and the United States has called China’s internment of at least 1 million Uighurs a genocide. China has also been criticized for the near disappearance of tennis star Peng Shuai after she accused a former member of the ruling Communist Party of sexually assaulting her.

But with more political, economic and military clout than 13½ years ago, China seems to care less about global scrutiny this time. And the COVID-19 pandemic has given him even more control over the Olympics, notably with the isolation of visiting journalists, separated in a “bubble” from the Chinese population.

“There is nothing to prove” at this point; 2008 was a coming out night and all it does is confirm what we have known for a decade,” Amanda Shuman, a China researcher at the University of Fribourg, wrote in an e-mail. email to the Associated Press.

“If anything, there’s a lot less pressure than in 2008,” she said. “The Chinese government knows very well that its global economic advantage allows it to do whatever it wants.” The IOC had few options when it awarded the Games to China for the second time. Six potential European candidates, led by Norway and Sweden, withdrew for political or cost reasons. Voters in two other countries – Switzerland and Germany – voted no in the referendums.

IOC members ultimately chose Beijing — an authoritarian state that doesn’t need voter approval to continue — over Almaty, Kazakhstan, in a close vote, 44-40.

The IOC allowed China to avoid human rights monitoring. Starting with the Paris Olympics in 2024, host cities must adhere to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. But China was not subject to these rules when it was chosen in 2015.

“When China hosts the Olympics again, it will no longer be the China of 2008,” Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei said in an email to the AP. Ai helped design the famous Bird’s Nest stadium that was used in the 2008 Games – hoping it would mean a new opening – then regretted doing it, calling it the Games’ ‘fake smile’ China Olympics. Ai was imprisoned in 2011 in China on unspecified charges and lives in exile in Portugal. The Bird’s Nest will once again host the opening ceremony on February 4.

“Today, China has moved even further away from democracy, press freedom and human rights, and the reality has become even harsher,” Ai added.

China’s tone has hardened since the last time it hosted the Games.

In 2008, Beijing clamped down on broadcasting from Tiananmen Square but allowed it; accepted “protest zones”, although they were never used, with access repeatedly denied; and removed some reporting restrictions more than a year before the Games. He also unblocked his censored internet for journalists.

In 2022, there are fewer dwellings. The pandemic will limit journalists to a hermetically sealed “bubble”, even if there will be internet access. Chinese organizers have warned foreign athletes that any statement contrary to Chinese law could be punished. And a smartphone app widely used by athletes and journalists has glaring security flaws, according to an internet watchdog.

Some National Olympic Committees have advised teams and staff not to bring personal phones or laptops to Beijing.

The IOC, which generates billions in sponsorships and broadcast rights, rarely publicly pushes back against Chinese organizers who are, in effect, the Chinese government.

Some of the changes affecting 2022 began a month after the 2008 Olympics ended when the global financial crisis hit. China fared better than most countries, which boosted its confidence.

China has since seen the rise of Xi Jinping, who led the 2008 Olympics and was named general secretary of the Communist Party in 2012.

“Although Xi was responsible for the 2008 Olympics, the Winter Games are really Xi’s Games,” said Xu Guoqi, who teaches history at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of “Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008”. Mary Gallagher, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, said the state of US democracy and its “poor response to the pandemic” has further emboldened China.

“Right now, multiple American failures are creating momentum for renewed nationalism and confidence in China,” Gallagher said by email. “This is made all the more effective by the Communist Party’s tight control over information, which can rain down positive energy” on what is happening in China while only publishing negative accounts from other countries, especially from the United States. around Tibet politicized the Olympics. The Olympic torch relay, taken on a world tour, faced violent protests in London and elsewhere. The IOC has not attempted such a relay since.

China, which has called the allegations of human rights abuses the “lie of the century”, said mixing sports and politics goes against the Olympic Charter. IOC President Thomas Bach also used this principle as a shield against criticism.

But others see hypocrisy on China’s part.

“Sports and politics intertwine,” Laura Luehrmann, a China scholar at Wright State University, said in an email. “Politics is about the distribution and use of limited resources – notably power and decision-making, but also finances. Sport is about power and money, even if it is presented as glorifying achievement Victor Cha, who served in the White House under President George W. Bush and is the author of “Beyond the Final Score – The Politics of Sports in Asia,” said China’s complaints to Others politicizing sport are “the pot that calls the black kettle.” “No country has ignored the Olympic Charter mandate to keep politics out of sport more than China,” wrote Cha, who teaches at Georgetown University, in an essay last week for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“Just as the world would like the Olympics to be without politics, as George Orwell once wrote: Sport is war minus shooting.”

(This story has not been edited by the Devdiscourse team and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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