Boycotting Beijing (And Only Beijing) is a Disingenuous Trap
The Beijing Olympics are scheduled to take place in a year. The noise around the Olympics at large is intensifying as calls for Tokyo 2020/1’s cancellation grow louder. The press is already calling Beijing’s second Olympics in 16 years “the most politically charged Olympics since the 1936 Berlin Games in Nazi Germany.” Activists have been targeting these Beijing Olympics as an opportunity to critique China’s controversial treatment of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities. But beneath the surface, most of these calls are framed to exceptionalize China’s crimes and propel a new Cold War without interrogating the exploitative milieu of global capitalism that inspired them, along with the Olympics. These calls are largely disingenuous and their logic has not been universally applied to the Olympic problem and global capitalism at large.
Our position is that the Beijing Olympics shouldn’t happen, just as no Olympics should happen. #NOlympicsAnywhere. The Olympics are fundamentally undemocratic and disproportionately punish the poor, regardless of where they take place. If the world will be scrutinizing what the Chinese government and corporate actors have done to their people in the name of Olympic profit and prestige in the past decade, we should also scrutinize the entire Olympic project itself.
The calls for boycott are utilizing the framework of human rights, and there’s a cognitive dissonance at play here. China, of course, is a convenient bogeyman for a variety of interests, and human rights serves as a vague-but-handy catch-all to describe their problems, both real and perceived. While we stand firmly against the PRC/China’s treatment of ethnic minorities, we must also understand how this framing, which positions China as a singular perpetuator of human rights violations and genocide, fails to address how the Olympics systematically amplify mutually reinforcing, though unique, exploitative systems by different state actors in an interconnected web of violence. For example, the interests calling for boycotting Beijing have been silent on the displacement in Tokyo and the “Human Rights” violations caused in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in the name of Olympic profits. There has also conveniently been silence on the mass displacement carried out in the name of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where an estimated 1.5 million people were evicted in the lead-up to the games. Housing is a human right, too.
Through a mainstream Western Imperialist lens, China poses a geopolitical threat. A narrow critique of their Olympics avoids confronting the larger problem, namely the collaborative nature between US and Chinese state and economic elites via capital even as they propel a loud rhetoric of geopolitical rivalry. China is often portrayed, like Russia, as its former Soviet self, not the country whose communist bones have been subsumed by capitalism and imperialism.
State repression is certainly a facet of Beijing 2022, but it’s not unique to China or this Olympiad. State suppression is baked into every Olympics, from Vancouver to Rio, Los Angeles to Tokyo. It’s nothing new. This is celebration capitalism at play, not communism. Any attempt to draw a line between the Cold War Boycott of the 1980 and 1984 Olympics to the Beijing Olympics is a dead end. But we know we’ll see this genre of lazy analysis all over editorial pages in the English language, as journalists echo trite political comparisons and the IOC predictably hides behind a phony shield of apoliticism.
One year to go, and the Beijing Boycott is now targeting Olympic sponsors. We generally encourage people around the world to be skeptical of and challenge Olympic sponsors and Olympic capital interests at large, especially community-decimating brands like Airbnb. But we again disagree with the logic. There is no way for anyone to appeal to the “social responsibility” of brands like Airbnb or the Olympics because both the Olympics and Airbnb are the agents of widespread harm to the poor, regardless of whether they partner on this event or how Airbnb decides to address the Uighur “reeducation camps.” Airbnb’s business is not clean to begin with. Their model relies on displacement. They can’t be relied upon to somehow transform into socially conscious actors, so any calls for reform will inevitably and surely fall flat.
Anyone bold enough to say “Boycott Beijing 2022” should also have the courage to look beneath the Olympic propaganda in Los Angeles and Tokyo and Paris and then tell us what “human rights” look like under capitalism.
There is no viable reform path for Beijing 2022 or rehabilitation for any of its remora brands. There is no moral, ethical, conscientious or “sustainable” way to host the Olympics or to partner with them. Though the PRC must be accountable for the conditions in Xinjiang and boasts one of the largest systems of incarceration on the planet, China is not a uniquely corrupt or punitive host nation. They all are worthy of our ire and criticism.
NOlympics LA, February 2021