“In the ‘Genocide Olympics,’ Are We All Complicit?”, The New York Times

How much good does a diplomatic boycott do?

In December, the White House announced that the United States wouldn’t send an official delegation to Beijing because President Biden didn’t want to “treat these Games as business as usual.” Still, the administration said, he would “absolutely” be watching.

It’s an arguably conflicted message, one that raises questions about what other reprobative action the administration might have taken. In 1980, when the Olympics were held in Moscow, the Carter administration instituted a full boycott in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, barring not just officials but also athletes from attending.

In retrospect, though, that boycott is largely seen as a failure.Hundreds of American athletes were deprived of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to compete, but the sacrifice had no discernible effect on the Soviet regime, which remained in Afghanistan until the end of the decade.

Taking note of that ill-fated decision, which prompted an apologyfrom the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee in 2020, the sports journalist Bob Costas said recently, “Unsatisfying as it may be, the course of action now that the Biden administration is taking is the correct one.”

But others think the U.S. government and others could be doing more. Victor Cha, senior vice president and Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, agrees that a boycott that extends to competitors “makes no sense.” At the same time, he believes the diplomatic boycott depoliticizes the Games by preventing government officials from airing their criticisms within China.

“China’s playbook is to weather the political storm in the run-up to the Games with the expectation that once the competitions start, the stories of athletic gold medal performance will dominate the media cycle and will mute the political protests,” he says.

Muslim-majority countries also have a special responsibility to speak out, Yasmeen Serhan argues in The Atlantic. As diverse as they are, she notes that majority-Muslim countries do occasionally make joint condemnations of injustices perpetrated against Muslims, such as Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar. But on the situation in Xinjiang, she believes the response has been lacking.

“There is no clear incentive for these countries to take a stand, nor is there an international movement advocating for majority-Muslim countries to use their collective voice,” she writes. “But without them, any Western-led effort to apply pressure on China is unlikely to have the desired effect.”

All eyes on the I.O.C.

Besides the Chinese government itself, perhaps no other entity has received as much blame for the compromised moral status of these Olympics than the International Olympic Committee.

• In recent years, the I.O.C. has come under fire for awarding the Games to authoritarian countries, like Russia and China, precisely because they can suppress domestic opposition.

• Making matters worse, critics note that the I.O.C. has allowed China to avoid a contractually mandated assessment of its human rights environment that future hosts will have to undergo.

• I.O.C. rules also prohibit athletes from using the podium or the playing field to peacefully protest.

“The International Olympic Committee appears to share the Chinese party-state’s desire for a controlled event free of televised controversy,” writes Maura Elizabeth Cunningham, a historian of China, in The Times. “I.O.C. officials have rebuffed attempts to discuss the moral or political implications of holding the Games in an authoritarian state, asserting time and again that sports and politics should not mix.”

How can the I.O.C. be reformed? One idea comes from U.S. Representatives Mike Waltz, Republican of Florida, and Jennifer Wexton, Democrat of Virginia, who have recently proposed bipartisan legislation that would strip the I.O.C. of its tax-exempt status. “American taxpayers should no longer subsidize investment into these Games that boost propaganda efforts of authoritarian regimes and embolden their image around the world,” they write in Newsweek.

What about the athletes?

No one is more vital to the Olympics than the athletes themselves. Do they bear a moral responsibility to refuse to participate? “You are the meat in the grinder of a giant entertainment-industrial complex,” Brian Alexander writes in The Boston Globe. “So if you were to begin feeling a little uncomfortable skiing, skating, or curling on the backs of innocent people imprisoned for the crime of being who they are and you decided not to go, you could force the I.O.C. to stop abetting the trampling of human rights.”