China’s ability to infiltrate and corrupt global institutions has strengthened and emboldened its genocidal regime. It’s for that reason that boycotting the 2022 Winter Olympics is worthwhile.
The International Olympic Committee is one of the institutions that China has managed to corrupt. The Washington Free Beacon obtained the minutes of a meeting between IOC member Juan Antonio Samaranch Salisachs and Chinese dissidents in October, when Salisachs dismissed the idea that the IOC endorses political systems and said that leveraging countries for change would be “dangerous.”
Of course, it’s an outright lie that the IOC doesn’t make political decisions. It has done so with Afghanistan in 2000, South Africa from 1964 to 1992, and Belarus just last December. The IOC has also continually threatened Taiwan, barring it from using its name, flag, or national anthem in IOC events under threat of expulsion.
Salisachs’s father, Juan Antonio Samaranch, was the IOC president from 1980 to 2001 and was instrumental in bringing the Olympics to China in 2008. He also advocated for China to play a bigger role in international sports, which the Chinese Communist Party has used to help whitewash its human rights abuses. Samaranch was a useful idiot for China, saying in 2008, “If we are talking about human rights, many countries that attack China should look at themselves.”
Now, his son, Salisachs, potentially a future IOC president, has taken that mantle from his father, heaping praise on the CCP. It doesn’t stop there: China is one of six countries to have three active-duty IOC members, and Chinese companies such as Alibaba, Mengniu Dairy, and ANTA have lucrative deals with the IOC.
This is why a boycott is necessary.
The argument that a boycott won’t work because the 1980 boycott of the Moscow Olympics didn’t make the Soviet Union leave Afghanistan is sophomoric. The purpose of boycotting China is not to change China’s behavior. It is to change the behavior of China’s enablers, and the IOC is one of the biggest and most shameless among them.
The IOC needs to be forced to understand that it can’t get away with its blatant hypocrisy, dancing between the idea it doesn’t play politics and its long track record of doing just that. It needs to be clear to IOC members that there is a financial price to pay for letting yourself become a stooge of the Chinese government and helping it dismiss or shrug off its human rights abuses.
Just as with the United Nations and the World Health Organization, playing by the IOC’s terms is not the answer. There must be a price for institutions that surrender themselves to Chinese influence, and boycotting the 2022 Beijing Games is the only way that can be made clear.
