It is not just a moral failure that the United States will participate in the Beijing Olympic Games. Our refusal to boycott because it would be inconvenient means we are leaving the safety and well-being of our athletes in the hands of the Chinese government.
We know the risks. Team USA is warning athletes against taking their personal phones to Beijing and encouraging them to bring burner phones instead due to concerns of digital surveillance by the Chinese government. Canada and the Netherlands have also recognized this concern. China’s authoritarianism is not lost on anyone, and we understand it will extend to our athletes, who will be in the country for over a month.
China’s authoritarianism also poses a threat to our athletes in the form of COVID-19. China, which has repeatedly lied about the spread and severity of COVID-19, will enforce stringent restrictions on athletes because of the coronavirus. China is untrustworthy when it comes to surveillance. Yet, we have signed off on sending our athletes to participate in this propaganda event because it would have been too much effort to force the International Olympic Committee to relocate the games.
Convenience governs our national relationship with China. Hollywood, the NBA, and other cultural institutions tiptoe around China hoping to keep access to the Chinese market. While Team USA warns athletes about Chinese surveillance, over 100 million people in the U.S. use TikTok, a social media app owned by a Chinese company that is “fundamentally parasitic” when it comes to collecting data.
It is convenient to ignore China’s genocide of the Uyghurs and instead complain about U.S. politics, as Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya, a minority owner of the Golden State Warriors, most recently showed. The same is true for corporate sponsors of the 2022 Genocide Games, including Coca-Cola, whose CEO denounced conservative policies as unacceptable while lobbying against a bill that would ban imported goods made with forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region.
It would have been inconvenient to launch an actual boycott of the 2022 Olympics or to stage our own winter games and invite our allies to join in defiance of the IOC’s decision to reward China. So instead we launched a pointless “diplomatic boycott,” while we accept China’s surveillance of our athletes and coaches and forced isolations that go far beyond what we know about COVID-19, all so the Genocide Games could go on.
