The U.S. Delegation at the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing. Credit: U.S. Army/Wikimedia Commons
When China was awarded the 2022 Winter Olympics seven years ago, very few outside the People’s Republic and its small circle of friendly regimes were thrilled. China’s human rights record was poor when it hosted the Summer Games to great fanfare in 2008, and things have only gotten worse since. Xinjiang, Hong Kong, ubiquitous tech surveillance, the suppression of civil society — the list is long. And Beijing’s sense of dominion has expanded to cover speech in any language, on any continent, and on any platform. The Covid-19 pandemic has just reinforced these worries.See this CSIS program on the Beijing Olympics, a videotaped panel discussion, with Scott Kennedy, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Rep. Young Kim, Sophie Richardson, Susan Lawrence, Charles Edel and Anna Ashton.
It is not surprising that many in the human rights community and U.S. Congress have at some point called for a full-scale boycott, suggesting that only by not participating would the U.S. demonstrate that it doe
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Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. Trade Representative under Donald Trump, reflects on his decision to launch the trade war with China and begin the process of "strategic decoupling" — a process he says the U.S. must see through to the end.
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