The opening ceremony last Friday marked the start of this year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing. While athletes from around the world have travelled to China to compete, political leaders from numerous countries, including the United States, decided to boycott the games and refused to attend. Their justification for this was the human rights violations occurring within China. The U.S. Department of State has released a list of assaultive actions the governing power has committed against the people of China, including forced labor, arbitrary arrests, and stifling freedom of expression, but the most severe of these is the repression of Xinjiang.
Xinjiang is a region in northwest China populated by ethnic minorities such as the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, as well as numerous religious minorities. First recorded in April of 2017, the Chinese government has systematically been forcing these minorities into internment camps with the intention of eventually eradicating their cultural and ethnic influences from China. Over one million people from this region have been detained and placed in camps, and accounts from those who have escaped internment or witnessed public arrests gruesomely described government forces’ frequent practices of torture, rape, forced drug use, and familial separation. Often the detainees’ children are taken and placed in indoctrination facilities to strip them of their culture and heritage. The horrific treatment of those within Xinjiang has led many political leaders in the West to try and stop these human rights violations. The United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights supports these efforts.
However, China’s attacks have failed to cease. The cold response has only solidified China’s aversion against the West. Allied with Russia, the Chinese government has expressed its distrust of the Western world, particularly the Western treaty organization N.A.T.O., and with leaders Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin presenting a united front at the opening ceremony of the games, it is unlikely that China will make significant change to better civilian freedoms. Both leaders gave a joint statement to the New York Times while at the games that the relationship between China and Russia has “no limits” and they agreed that N.A.T.O. needed to stop its expansion east.
While boycotting the Olympics sends a clear political message, peaceful resolution does not seem likely. By not attending, Western nations have pushed China and Russia closer in support of each other, which may complicate any future conversations about universal human rights. Political statements like these are useful to clearly depict disdain for China’s actions, but they do little to help those within China who are in desperate need of protection. Further political conversations must occur on a global scale to instigate action against those who hold power, rather than sending an idle statement of displeasure.
