Boycotting the Beijing Olympics: the stakes are high for Western governments and commercial sponsors

Question: What do Alastair Sim, the Beijing Winter Olympics, Coca-Cola, and the 1880 Irish Land War have in common?

Answer: Boycott.

Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott to be precise. Sim played an Irish priest in the 1947 film about the Land War in which tenant farmers,  fighting against higher rents and evictions imposed by absentee English landlords, adopt passive resistance. They refuse to gather Boycott’s crops and ostracise anyone who cooperates with him. The British Army is called in, but the farmers win. In the final scene, Sim’s character tells them: “In this little parish you have set an example which will go down in history and will be studied and followed wherever people are oppressed. If any man offends against the community, you can ostracise him, you can isolate him. You can boycott him”. 

Thus, the captain becomes the eponym for the verb and common noun ‘boycott’.

Which brings us to the Beijing Winter Olympics. There are growing calls for them to be boycotted although to date no government has, despite the Biden Administration calling China’s treatment of its Uighur minority ‘genocide’ as have the parliaments of the UK, Canada, Belgium the Netherlands, and others. And that brings us to Coca-Cola, one of the sponsors of the upcoming games. If governments ease off on their attitude to concentration camps, forced abortions, torture, and public executions in sports stadiums, to maintain cordial diplomatic relations, what is Coca-Cola’s (and other multi nationals) reason for not boycotting the place where, as Sim put it, ‘people are oppressed’?

We know the answer is the dollar sign. You can even make a case for that and for corporations keeping out of politics. But it become harder to make that case when you look at Coca-Cola’s track record of positioning itself as a leading progressive business which “respects human rights everywhere”. Coke is so vocal on progressive ideas that it’s been nicknamed ‘Woka-Cola’ by some detractors.

And yet…. At a bipartisan Congressional hearing last month, executives representing Beijing Olympic sponsors Coca-Cola, Airbnb, Visa, and Procter & Gamble preferred not to answer when asked if they agreed with the U.S. government that China was committing a genocide against Uighurs and other Muslim minority groups. Worse still, the New York Times reports that Coke lobbied against a bill banning imports from forced labour camps in Xinjiang province, home to the Uighurs. Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski told the Coke exec: “You are afraid of them in a way that you are not afraid of critics in the United States. I think that’s shameful.”

Warming to his subject, Malinowski then asked the Airbnb representative if he would sponsor an event in Los Angeles “if the state of California was holding hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ Americans, Jewish Americans and African Americans in concentration camps”. The response was that the question was “hypothetical “but that “human rights is core to our values.”

The issue here is hypocrisy. It seems clear that most Western multi nationals are happy to try and make as much profit as possible in the liberal democracies by selling their brand as progressive and caring, but to make as much profit as possible in authoritarian states by simply selling their products. The International Olympic Committee is unlikely to point this out. It derives about 18% of its billions of dollars income from sponsors, and about 40% just from NBC for the broadcast rights in the USA. The IOC’s position is always that boycotts run counter to the purpose and history of the Olympics.

And governments? There’s a degree of hypocrisy here too, but the stakes are higher. A country’s entire economy can be affected by a foreign policy decision and that impacts on millions of people’s lives. China’s punishment of Australia after Canberra dared to call for an inquiry into the source of Covid-19 is a case in point. Many voters would not support a decision taken on moral grounds if it hurt them and their families. However, the question of boycotting the Beijing Olympics is not just about economics or morality, it’s also connected to the geo-politics of the next decade.

When Beijing was awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics many observers suggested the event would help to liberalise the one-party state, especially as there was a view that greater economic success would lead to greater freedoms. These ideas were mostly held by people without experience of Communist regimes or indeed the traditional Chinese thinking about the tensions between individual freedoms and community responsibility. In the event China pocketed the kudos, held its great coming out onto the world stage party, and continued its repressive journey.

This time it looks set to polish its somewhat Covid-tarnished reputation, and showcase its newfound wealth, sporting prowess, and ability to hold a world class Olympic Games while simultaneously being one of the world’s worst human rights abusers. If so, it will fit the narrative of President Xi Jinping who is convinced the West’s days in the sun are ending, and that it is too weak to stand up to China.

There’s an argument that Olympic boycotts don’t work, but that depends on your starting point. If it’s that the boycotted country is barely dented by the action, then that’s often the case. But if you care about the actions of your country, then the behaviour of the boycotter matters and its statements about values are made and heard.

It’s lose/lose. Boycott – and you risk reprisals, as well as ruining the dreams of athletes who have spent years reaching for the moment. Attend – and you risk promoting a dictatorship which intends to dominate you, and is already dominating its Christians, Buddhists, Falun Gong, dissidents, Tibetans, Turkmen, and Uighurs.