Secretary of State Antony Blinken hopes to develop a “coordinated approach” to a potential boycott for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing as China’s atrocities against Uyghur Muslims galvanizes opposition to the games.
“It is something that we certainly wish to discuss,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters on Tuesday. “A coordinated approach will be not only in our interest but also in the interest of our allies and partners.”
Blinken has avoided expressing specific preferences about the 2022 Winter Games, which have been slated for Beijing since 2015. China’s repression of the Uyghur population has intensified in the years since the communist regime won the competition to host the games. Survivor accounts and independent research about sexual violence and the suppression of Uyghur birth rates spurred the United States to identify the repression as an act of genocide by Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping.
“Our review of those Olympics and our thinking will involve close consultations with partners and allies around the world,” Price said. “What the United States does is meaningful, what the United States does will have impact, but everything we do that brings along our allies and partners will have all the more influence with Beijing.”
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Uyghur activists have urged the International Olympic Committee to move the 2022 games out of Beijing.
“If the IOC allows China to host the 2022 Winter Games, it is willfully and intentionally abandoning the values and principles that underpin the Olympic Movement,” World Uyghur Congress President Dolkun Isa said last year. “Further, it is likely that the technology and merchandising used for the Olympic will be tainted by the well-reported forced transportation and slave labor against us.”
That argument has been taken up by some Republican lawmakers, but other China hawks have argued that the U.S. should still send athletes to Beijing in the event that the IOC refuses to change locations.
“Our athletes should go to Beijing next year proudly, bring home medal after medal, and show the world what it means to compete on behalf of a free society,” Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, argued last month. “We shouldn’t give China an easy way to run up its medal count by preventing Americans from going to the Olympics.”
The games are scheduled to run from Feb. 4-20 of next year, but Price implied that it is plenty of time to develop a specific plan for a boycott or some alternative initiative.
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“So this is one of the issues that is on the agenda, both now and going forward,” he said. “And when we have something to announce, we will be sure to do that.”
