Prominent Chinese activists are urging the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to reject Beijing’s bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics amid what rights groups say is an unprecedented crackdown on dissidents.
The IOC will vote on Friday to select the host for the 2022 Winter Games. The competition has come down to two finalists: Beijing or Almaty, Kazakhstan. Beijing is regarded as the favorite due to China’s growing international clout.
However, activists say the Chinese government has not improved its record on human rights since 2008, when Beijing hosted the Summer Games. In fact, the Communist Party’s actions have appreciably worsened, they say. Hundreds of human rights lawyers and advocates have been detained or interrogated in the past few weeks, part of a suspected effort by the party to crush incipient forms of civil society that oppose the government.
A group of Chinese activists, including prominent dissidents Chen Guangcheng and Hu Jia, wrote a letter to Thomas Bach, the IOC’s president, on Friday and called on him and the committee to boycott Beijing’s candidacy.
Rewarding China with the Winter Games while it continues to repress its own people, they said, would violate the Olympic Charter’s pledge of "promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity."
"If the International Olympic Committee awards Beijing the 2022 Winter Olympics, a great event intended to promote solidarity, brotherhood and human development will once again serve a corrupt dictatorship," the activists wrote. "It will endorse a government that blatantly violates human rights."
During the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, the party reportedly evicted more than 1 million people to clear space for construction and arrested dozens of activists who sought to protest the event.
Some athletes who were dissidents were banned from participating in the games. Fang Zheng, a record-holding discus thrower in China, was barred from competing in the 2008 Paralympics because a tank crushed his legs during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989—a violent government crackdown on student demonstrators that the party has attempted to keep out of public discussion.
Liu Xiaobo, a prominent Chinese activist and Nobel Laureate, was detained just months after the conclusion of the Summer Games in 2008. He is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence on charges of "subversion" that critics say are politically motivated.
"The 2008 Summer Olympics made a mockery of the fine principles that the Olympics stands for, and brought more humiliation than dignity and more sadness than joy to the people in China," the activists wrote in the letter.
Additionally, about 300 activists were detained or harassed during last summer’s Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing.
The United States has previously boycotted Olympics events in authoritarian countries, such as the 1980 Games in Moscow. That year’s Olympics followed the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.
A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on the campaign to reject Beijing’s bid for the 2022 Games. A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
Activists have become increasingly concerned about an escalation in repression under President Xi Jinping, who is widely regarded as the most authoritarian Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. According to the group Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), nearly 2,000 human rights advocates have been arbitrarily detained since Xi rose to power in 2013. In the latest crackdown on lawyers, 29 are being held in secret facilities or have effectively disappeared, CHRD says.
Beijing passed a new national security law at the beginning of this month that has enabled police to curtail dissent and jail activists, critics say. There is also draft legislation for other measures regarding Internet security, counterterrorism, and foreign non-government organizations (NGOs) that could soon lead to more detentions.
The controversy surrounding Beijing’s Winter Olympics bid comes amid heightened scrutiny of international sporting events in authoritarian countries. Russia, which hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and will host the 2018 World Cup, was accused of massive corruption after the completion of construction projects for the 2014 event. Both Russia and Qatar, which is set to host the 2022 World Cup, could lose the marquee soccer events if an investigation proves that the nations bribed FIFA officials.
Beijing also might have a more climatic problem with hosting a Winter Games—a lack of mountains and snow. Chinese officials say events such as skiing would be held in more mountainous cities about 100 miles northwest of Beijing. Water sources will also be present to produce artificial snow, officials say, despite persistent water shortages in the region.