The official cold shoulder
US POLITICIANS won’t go to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics but US athletes will still be able to compete.
The US decision to implement a diplomatic boycott to protest China’s human rights record comes after Washington spent months wrangling with what position to take on the Games, hosted in February next year by a country it accuses of perpetrating “genocide” against Uyghur Muslims in the northwestern Xinjiang region.
There was no immediate reaction from Beijing, but the Chinese foreign ministry earlier threatened “resolute countermeasures” if any such boycott were implemented.
It was swiftly welcomed by politicians in the US, where President Joe Biden has been under pressure to speak out against Chinese rights abuses. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden administration would not send any diplomatic or official representation to the Beijing Games, given China’s “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses”. She said, however, “the athletes on Team USA have our full support”.
Campaigners say that at least one million Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking, mostly Muslim, minorities have been incarcerated in camps in Xinjiang, where China is also accused of forcibly sterilising women and imposing forced labour. Sending official representation to the Olympics would signal that, despite China’s “egregious human rights abuses and atrocities in Xinjiang”, the Games were “business as usual,” Psaki said.
“And we simply can’t do that,” she continued.
Bob Menendez, the chair of the US Senate foreign relations committee, called on “other allies and partners that share our values to join with the United States in this diplomatic boycott”.
Human Rights Watch called the decision “crucial” but urged more accountability “for those responsible for these crimes and justice for the survivors.”