FASTER, HIGHER, FEWER — Plenty of athletes are making plans to get themselves, their skis and their curling brooms to Beijing this February for the Winter Olympics. And for plenty of countries, those athletes and their coaches will be the only representatives, as diplomatic boycotts of the Chinese games accelerated this week. Canada, Australia and the U.K. joined the U.S. today by announcing they would not be sending government officials to Beijing. These Olympics will take place against the backdrop of a Western furor over China’s humanitarian and geopolitical actions, a departure from the traditional message of peace and goodwill the Games hope to convey. Nightly turned to China Watcher author Phelim Kine to forecast the political flurries that will swirl around the 2022 Winter Olympics. This conversation has been edited. Now that we’re seeing Western diplomatic boycotts, what other actions can we expect before the games from democratic countries? The U.S., Australian, New Zealand and Canadian diplomatic boycotts deprive the Chinese government of “today at the Olympics” photo opportunities with senior government leaders from those countries, which the Chinese government could spin as implicit support for Chinese policies generally, without harming athletes who have dedicated a significant portion of their lives to training for the Beijing Games in the way that a full boycott would do. It’s likely that Biden’s virtual Summit for Democracy on Dec. 9 and 10, which brings together the leaders of more than 100 democratic states, will produce a longer list of countries joining the ranks of Olympic diplomatic boycotters. With Western leaders out at the Games, what countries will show up in Beijing? Clearly Beijing hopes that neighboring South Korea and Japan will send some form of official representation — neither country has confirmed attendance yet — but topping the list of high-profile attendees will be Russian President Vladimir Putin, who signaled weeks ago that he would attend the Beijing Games opening ceremony. It may well be that Chinese leader Xi Jinping will use that occasion to hold a mini-summit with Putin where they can rail about their exclusion from the Summit for Democracy and perhaps announce plans for a counter-summit for more “democratically challenged” states. It’s the governments of those states, including Hungary, Venezuela, Myanmar and Cuba, that will want to make a splash with their representatives attending the Games in a show of solidarity with Beijing and might tempt some pundits to christen them the “Autocracy Games.” Smaller developing states that have benefitted from infrastructure investments though Xi’s signature Belt and Road Initiative will likely also send government representatives to avoid offending a patron. These Olympics will be awash in corporate funding, like those in the past. Republicans have called on corporations to reconsider their sponsorship of the Beijing Games. Has this pressure had any effect? U.S. corporate sponsors of the Beijing Games as well as its official foreign broadcaster, NBCUniversal, have been under intense pressure from both human rights organizations and U.S. lawmakers to speak out about and disavow human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese government. Those sponsors and NBCUniversal are refusing to do so for reasons including that their contracts with the International Olympic Committee and/or the Beijing authorities precludes any such actions. Sponsors also stress that their contractual obligations typically span multiple Olympics, not just the 2022 Beijing Games, and that they can’t just walk away from multi-year, multi-competition contracts due to concerns about Beijing. Those arguments are going nowhere with both rights advocates and U.S. lawmakers, so you can expect a sharp intensification of public and political scrutiny and criticism of sponsors and NBCUniversal as the days count down to the opening of the Games on Feb. 4, 2022. The genocide of Uyghurs in Western China is one of the top issues governments around the world have taken China to task over. How do you expect this issue to be addressed at the Olympics? I think we can definitely expect a degree of athlete activism at this Games far exceeding what we’ve seen at other high profile international sports events, due to wide public recognition and concern about human rights abuses in China. That includes the plight of Xinjiang Uyhgurs, as well as concerns about the Chinese government’s effective evisceration of rule of law and universal rights and freedoms in Hong Kong over the past two years. I suspect that the outspoken criticism of China’s human rights record by Boston Celtics center Enes Kanter will inspire athletes who compete in Beijing to also express their concerns in ways that catch media attention. The apparent enforced disappearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai and the World Tennis Association’s move to suspend all competitions in China pending clarity over her well being will also be a powerful motivator for political statements of various kinds for young female Olympians who have been part of the global #MeToo movement against sexual violence. So China will have its hands full trying to prevent and mitigate an array of possibly very high-profile criticisms of its human rights record by foreign athletes Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at tweyant@politico.com , or on Twitter at @tweyant.
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