Battling Brutal Beijing
Concord Monitor, Op-Ed
The U.S. decision to stage a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing tells the world and China that the U.S. will not stand idly by as the Chinese Community Party (CCP) commits crimes against humanity, conducts cultural erasure and perpetrates a horrific genocide against the Uyghur population in Chinese- occupied East Turkestan.
Many have compared America’s decision with the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, noting the commonality of protesting a communist regime’s policies. But there’s a better comparison — the 1936 Summer Olympics in Nazi Germany which inspired a broad public debate transpired about the possibility of an American boycott.
Judge Jeremiah Mahoney, president of the Amateur Athletics Union (AAU), led the charge to boycott the games, arguing that participation would be a defacto endorsement of Hilter’s Reich. Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, argued there was no place for politics in sports. Brundage’s position won. Once the AAU voted to participate, boycott efforts failed. The main issue was the impact on athletes.
This year’s diplomatic boycott, first proposed by Sen. Mitt Romney, astutely sends a strong message while trying to not penalize the dedicated efforts of U.S. athletes.
Sen. Romney, who was chief of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, drafted the initial diplomatic boycott provisions. Romney had the experience and expertise to pragmatically bring both hawks and doves together to issue such a strong statement.
As of this writing, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (plus don’t forget Lithuania!) have joined the United States. If additional countries join the diplomatic boycott, the loud and clear message would be a resounding rebuke of China’s human rights practices. If more countries don’t join (note South Korea’s decision), China may interpret the reaction as tacit acceptance of their “internal” dynamics.
Too much is at stake for us to stop with the boycott. Congress recently passed a bill that will ban the imports of “goods mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part with forced labor” in China’s Xinjiang region. This is great, but we need more. We must also highlight the Chinese regime’s approach to quelling criticism and given we’re talking sports, let’s consider the CCP’s influence on the National Basketball Association. Although NBA executives, coaches and players regularly participate in social justice movements, their relative silence on China’s human rights abuses has been deafening.
Recall Daryl Morey’s infamous 2019 tweet, “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong” in support of the former British colony’s democracy protests. Soon after, China canceled the broadcast of all NBA games on China Central Television (CCTV), suspended the partnership between the NBA and Tencent (later reversed) and canceled multiple events in China with the league’s philanthropic arm, NBA Cares. The economic coercion only ended with a series of full-throated apologies and NBA league-wide cowardice.
Over the past several years, well-regarded NBA leaders like Mark Cuban and Steve Kerr had no problem at all in airing their laundry list of political issues. Yet, when it came to the politics of the NBA’s second most profitable country, they and the rest of the league were silent. They should end their silence, take a stance and use their power and voice to help highlight the unacceptable Chinese behavior.
One voice in the NBA standing up to authoritarian governments is Enes Kanter, or as he is now known, Enes Kanter Freedom (he just changed his name last month to include the liberty synonym on the back of his jersey). Freedom has found himself in trouble with the NBA for calling Chinese President Xi Jinping a “brutalist dictator,” wearing “FREE TIBET” basketball shoes during games and using Twitter to raise awareness of the Uyghur genocide. Most recently, Freedom called out former NBA star Jeremy Lin for returning to China to play basketball for the Beijing Ducks.
What Freedom and Romney have in common, I believe, is an acknowledgment that we are in a war of values against the Chinese regime. It’s time to draft the support of all American celebrity athletes and professional sports leagues. They have an enormous ability to influence public opinion, direct consumer spending and raise awareness. They are instruments of what Joe Nye, former Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, has called American soft power.
Would fans want to know that more than 20% of the world’s cotton is sourced from China and much of that (84% by China’s own count) comes from areas in which the genocide is taking place?
The time has come to implement a full-court press, a blitz, an infield shift or whatever sports defense analogy you want to use to speak out against the unspeakable crimes being committed in China. Kowtowing to CCP cash needs to end.
(Vikram Mansharamani of Lincoln is a lecturer at Harvard University and the author of “Think For Yourself: Restoring Common Sense in an Age of Experts and Artificial Intelligence.”)