Will countries boycott China’s Olympics in 2022?
Outrage about Xinjiang is fuelling calls to stay away
IN 2015, WHEN the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded the 2022 Winter Olympics to Beijing, some people criticised the decision because of China’s human-rights record. Just in the previous few weeks China had rounded up hundreds of civil-society activists across the country. But the rival candidate for the games was another authoritarian state, Kazakhstan. Democracies such as Norway had pulled out of the race. And few people even imagined that, within two years, China would be building a gulag in Xinjiang to incarcerate more than 1m ethnic Uyghurs because of their religious and cultural beliefs.
This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “Winter of discontent”
From the March 27th 2021 edition
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