Who Really Wants to Meet Boring People Anyway
Why the US boycott over China's Olympics will have little effect
The Olympics has always been a drama factory. From Nancy Kerrigan’s kneecapping to Russian athletes doping, there is always something new going on. The latest dose of Olympic drama has been the US boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics.
Because of China’s treatment of ethnic minorities, the United States government has imposed a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Olympics. The boycott wouldn’t mean that American athletes would be barred from participating in the Olympics, instead, the US would not be sending government officials to the games. Many countries have also joined in. After the US announced its boycott, Canada, Britain, and Australia also announced diplomatic boycotts.
The diplomatic boycott is intended to snub China and bring attention to the Chinese treatment of ethnic minorities, but it probably won’t have its intended effect. It will probably change very little of the current situation in China.
To put it simply, China doesn’t going to care if western countries run diplomatic boycotts. It’s really not a big deal. They aren’t going to receive
any economic backlash if the US boycotts the Olympics.
Furthermore, boycotting the Olympics isn’t going to bring attention to China’s human rights abuses. World leaders are already well aware of China’s behavior on the world stage. Not showing up isn’t going to make them more aware of the abuses.
If western countries want to actually get China to change its behavior, they need to do something that actually hurts China. If the US boycotts goods from China, there is a more likely chance of garnering a response, considering that China heavily exports to the US. These things would hurt China’s economy, but they’re also going to hurt the US, which is really harmful to the US economy.
Congress recently passed a bill that would ban imports from Xinjing province, where Ughxers were being housed in ‘re-education camps,’ unless the business could prove it wasn’t made with forced labor. Businesses, like Nike, apparently lobbied to stop the bill from passing. The bill did pass both houses of congress, but it demonstrated that it would be much harder to pass sanctions because many businesses are against it.
A diplomatic boycott of the Olympics is simply an easier way for the US to “call out” China’s behavior. The US suffers economically when it passes sanctions, but boycotts of the Olympics have little harm on the US economy.
The boycott also suggests other motives. As some people have pointed out, countries don’t really care about human rights. Often, they just turn a blind eye to human rights abuses when their allies commit them. For example, when Mohammad Bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, had pretty substantial evidence that he murdered a journalist, the Trump administration basically did nothing. In fact, Donald Trump once bragged that he “saved [the crown prince’s] ass.”
Saudi Arabia likely got away with its human rights abuses because it was a US ally. It probably was able to get away with the murder because Saudi Arabia was a strategic ally of the US.
The US is likely only calling out China because it views China as an adversary. This is not to say that the US shouldn’t call out other countries. It’s that the US needs to call out all countries who commit human rights abuses, not just its rivals. If the US continues to turn a blind eye to its ally’s human rights abuses, it’s going to continue its streak of losing credibility on the world stage, making it lose its position as a leader on the world stage.