Beijing Winter Olympic Games: Why Are Countries Boycotting It

The Winter Olympic games will be held this year in China.

The global politics and the modern cold war between China and USA seem again mounting with the Diplomatic boycott announced by the US.

Many powerful countries have joined with the USA to boycott the winter Olympic games in terms of diplomatic level.

In this post, we will discuss why the countries boycott the winter Olympic games in China, in 2022.

Why are the countries boycotting?

As mentioned earlier, many countries including the USA are going to a diplomatic boycott.

The US will not send its government officials to the winter Olympic games in China due to the various human rights abuses of China.

There are serious allegations for China about Human Rights abuses such as genocides against minority Uyghur Muslims in the western region of Xinjiang.

Australia also followed the US by deciding not to send its government officials to China. Australia tried to discuss the human rights allegations with China. But China blocks the imports of Australian goods. The tensions between Australia and China rise recently, in 2018, Canberra banned Huawei technology from its 5G broadband network and called for an investigation about the origin of the Covid-19.  China also imposed tariffs for Australian goods such as coal, beef, wine, etc.

Britain also will limit the government attendance for the winter Olympic games in China. It is a short diplomatic boycott which means Britain will not completely boycott it.

Japan, Canada, Lithuania, Belgium, and Denmark also will join the diplomatic boycott.

But the US allies like South Korea and France refused to join the diplomatic boycott.

The major reason for this diplomatic boycott is to react to the human rights abuses of China.

Most recently, Beijing restricted the freedom of people in Hong Kong by introducing new laws such as Hong Kong national security law.

Also, the recent case is the Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, who accused a former top government official in China of sexually assaulting her.

Previous Boycotts

This is not the first time that a country boycotted diplomatically.

3 years ago European countries including Britain started a diplomatic boycott for the Russian Football Worldcup.

Also in 1980, athletes from 66 countries including the US boycotted Moscow Olympics due to the Soviet Invasion in Afghanistan.

What are the impacts?

There is not a direct or serious impact here. Also, the diplomatic boycott is not affecting the athletes of the countries. For example, even though the USA started a diplomatic boycott, the athletes of the USA will participate in the games.

The objective of this diplomatic boycott is to raise awareness of the human rights abuses of China and to damage the pride of China.

However, China reacted to it as the US will pay the price.

Further readings- 

Is the trade war a power struggle between major powers?  

Everything you need to know about China’s economy and the pandemic period  

Hidden agenda of Chinese medical diplomacy  

the role of the China towards South Asia  

Is Trump starting a trade war?  

Sino-American rivalry

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Website Powered by WordPress.com.

Up ↑

%d bloggers like this: