China warned Monday that it would take "countermeasures" if the United States called for a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics, a possibility that US President Joe Biden admitted to "considering".
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Such a boycott - which would mean that no representative of the United States government attends the Games, in which the athletes, on the other hand, would participate - would be nothing but "fanfaronnade", the spokesperson for the Department of Human Rights said. Foreign Affairs Zhao Lijian Monday.
"If the United States wants at all costs to do things its way, China will take firm countermeasures", he added, while according to the American media CNN and NBC, the American administration could announce this diplomatic boycott this week.
"I insist on the fact that the Winter Olympics are not a scene for taking political postures and manipulating", added Zhoa Lijian.
For months, the US government has been looking for the best way to position itself with regard to the Winter Games, a popular and global event organized from February 4 to 20, 2022 by a country it accuses of perpetrating a "genocide" against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, northwest China.
Several human rights organizations accuse Beijing of having interned at least one million Muslims in Xinjiang in “re-education camps”.
The American Olympic Committee is opposed to a total boycott, explaining that the Games are important after months of a pandemic.
He has ruled in the past that the boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980, by the United States and some 60 other countries, and of those of Los Angeles in 1984, by the Soviet Union and its allies, had shown that 'using these events as a "political tool" was a "mistake".
