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The Olympics in China provide explosive material: First politicians are calling for a move - the debate could soon hit Europe hard

2021-02-08T13:04:30.501Z


The Olympic Winter Games in Beijing are scheduled for 2022. Politicians in the USA and Canada are calling for a transfer because of the massive incarceration of Uyghurs. The debate should spill over to Europe.


The Olympic Winter Games in Beijing are scheduled for 2022.

Politicians in the USA and Canada are calling for a transfer because of the massive incarceration of Uyghurs.

The debate should spill over to Europe.

  • MPs in Canada and the United States are calling for the 2022 Winter Olympics to be relocated from Beijing.

  • American diplomats are exploring the issue in private talks with their allies.

  • The main reason is the internment camps for hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Ottawa / Beijing - Olympics in China 2022 - the sporting event could soon become a political issue: In Canada, 13 MPs have already called for the Winter Games to be moved from Beijing to another location.

As the Canadian newspaper

Global News

reported at the weekend, the MPs wrote in an open letter that participation would "pollute" the athletes.

In the United States, too, several Republican congressmen had campaigned for a move in recent weeks.

Human rights organizations are also putting pressure on: 180 human rights groups - including large organizations such as Human Rights Watch, as well as the Tibetan Association in Germany and the group "Germany Stands with Hong Kong" - called for a boycott of the Beijing Games in an open letter to governments around the world: "Anything else would be seen as a confirmation of the authoritarian rule of the Chinese Communist Party and as an obvious disregard for civil and human rights." The new US President Joe Biden initially did not comment on the subject.

The IOC and the EU are also keeping a low profile for the time being.

Olympic Winter Games in China: Opponents: inside demand relocation from Beijing or boycott

The main reason for the protests is the location in Xinjiang in western China.

Up to a million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities are said to have been interned in camps there.

Human rights groups and researchers accuse China of re-educating the people in the camps against their will to become socialist-minded citizens and obliging them to do forced labor, for example in cotton fields.

China is already publicly resisting the calls for boycotts - a sign that Beijing is taking them seriously.

Foreign Office spokesman Wang Wenbin called these calls "irresponsible" last week.

"Such actions are not supported by the international community and will never be successful," Wang told journalists.

China has since acknowledged the existence of these camps, but denies that they are re-education camps.

Rather, the camps served to deradicalize extremist Muslims.

Uyghurs get an education there that improves their chances on the job market, according to the official language regulation.

Beijing has so far hardly convinced the West with this reading.

Especially since there are reports that the Xinjiang area is full of surveillance cameras.

There are also individual reports of torture or forced sterilization of Uighur women in the region.

The classification of the reports has implications for politics.

Is it suppressive measures against those who think differently in an increasingly authoritarian state, is it a forced assimilation - as it has been practiced time and again in conquered border regions by China in its long history - or is it even genocide?

This is how former Foreign Secretary Mike Pompeo described the situation in Xinjiang on his last day in office.

His successor, Anthony Blinken, agreed with this assessment during his Senate hearing.

Other critics tend to speak of “cultural genocide”, ie a planned extinction of the cultural identity - not of life - of the Uighurs.

China rules with a hard hand in Xinjiang: How does Joe Biden decide on the subject of the Olympics in Beijing?

Even if the latter is more likely to be the case, the word is in the world.

And that doesn't make things

any easier

for

Joe Biden

in an already more complicated world.

According to a

Washington Post

report

, citing a diplomat, there are behind-the-scenes discussions at the working level with Western allies about how to deal with the games in the face of the genocide allegation.

The issue could become an "early focus of emerging government policy on China," according to the

Washington Post

.

"We will work closely with allies and partners at all levels to define our common concerns and define our common approach to China," said the White House.

The debate is likely to spill over to Europe soon.

Rise of China: Foreign policy complicated for US President Joe Biden from the start

China

is one of the main reasons why Biden is not given a grace period on foreign policy.

In his first week in office he had to intervene in the simmering conflicts in East Asia;

a US aircraft carrier still dispatched by Trump is in the South China Sea.

China is an aspiring economic power that - contrary to what many hoped for in the past - will not democratize itself with increasing prosperity.

On the contrary, as its economic power grows, China will become an economic and geopolitical competitor to the USA.

Beijing questions the principle of universal democratization - cooperation with other democratic states such as the EU is therefore very important for Biden in the fight to maintain and strengthen democracy.

In areas such as climate protection, the USA - like the EU - must work together with China in order to achieve anything at all.

+

View of the groomed ski slopes at the National Alpine Ski Center northwest of Beijing.

Will international athletes start there in a year?

© Mark Schiefelbein / picture alliance / dpa / AP

Meanwhile, the debate about the Olympics also shows where it will lead if Western democratic states withdraw from hosting the Games.

Beijing won the games after several European candidates, including Oslo, Stockholm and Munich, withdrew their applications for political and financial reasons.

Citizens' decisions in Bavaria in 2013 rejected the games in Munich, Garmisch-Partenkirchen and two other districts.

Beijing then won the election with 44 to 40 votes against Almaty in also authoritarian Kazakhstan.

Olympic Games: uncertainty also because of the corona virus

Another uncertainty for the upcoming Olympic Games - not only those in Beijing, but also the summer games in Tokyo postponed to this year - is the corona virus.

Whether major events like these can take place in the near future will depend heavily on the global development of the pandemic.

Source: merkur

All news articles on 2021-02-08

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