Calls to boycott the Beijing winter Olympics are growing stronger

ON A RAINY day in central London in April 2008, Laurence Lee, then a presenter for Al Jazeera, a broadcaster, told viewers that that year’s Olympics in Beijing would be “the most heavily politicised Olympics since Moscow in 1980.” Mr Lee was reporting from the London stretch of the global torch relay, at which pro-Tibet protesters clashed with police as they tried to draw attention to human-rights abuses in China.

The 2022 winter Olympics may soon claim that title from the 2008 summer games. Covid-related holdups notwithstanding, in 2022 Beijing will become the first city to have hosted both the summer and winter games. Calls to boycott the event are stronger now than they were in 2008. In September more than 160 human-rights organisations called on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to withdraw the games from Beijing. On November 9th the Australian Senate will debate a motion presented by two crossbench senators, Rex Patrick and Jacqui Lambie, calling for a boycott. Dominic Raab, Britain’s foreign secretary, has refused to rule one out. Josh Hawley and Rick Scott, two Republican senators in America, have called on NBCUniversal, which owns the rights to broadcast the Olympics in the country, to “pick human rights over profits” and refuse to air the games. The situation in Xinjiang—where more than 1m people are detained in concentration camps and are subjected to torture, forced sterilisations and forced labour—has led to a “step change in how people are looking at human rights in China,” says Bill Bishop, the author of Sinocism, a newsletter.