There are updated rules in place to allow athletes to express their concerns, but well away from the tracks, slopes, rinks and podiums. Chinese officials have warned athletes they must adhere to Chinese law at all times. Noah Hoffman thinks the idea that athletes are “at liberty to speak out” about China’s mass incarceration and so-called “egregious” abuse of thousands of minority Muslim Uyghurs “is just false”. BBC
The Winter Olympics will go forward. They always do. The opening ceremony is Friday in China, which is hosting the celebration of sport and unity even as it is caught in the cross hairs of international controversy over its record on human rights. Amid the hoopla and celebration, the Beijing government will be asked about its crackdowns in Hong Kong and Tibet and the repressive treatment of its predominantly Muslim Uyghur minority. Perhaps the organizers or the International Olympic Committee will give faint assurances about the well-being of the tennis…
Advertisement At the age of 17, Kamaltürk Yalqun was one of several students chosen to help carry the Olympic flame ahead of the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. Today, he is an activist in the United States calling for a boycott of the upcoming Winter Games over China’s treatment of his Uyghur ethnic community. “It seems to me that our sense of global citizenship and sportsmanship is not moving forward with these Olympic Games anymore,” Yalqun said in a phone interview from Boston, where he now lives in exile. In…
Advertisement Does China have a coherent foreign policy? The “wolf warrior” debate over the past two years implied that China’s foreign policy took a new direction and is now being wound back. However, wolf warrior discourse dominated only the traditional diplomacy bureaucracy; diplomacy is not foreign policy. The disparate nature of foreign policymaking within Communist Parties makes it difficult to speak of a singular foreign policy. The institutionalization of foreign policy making mechanisms within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also solidifies this separation. Wolf warrior diplomacy was indeed a foreign…
Feb 3rd 2022 HALF A CENTURY ago Richard Nixon took a gamble that made history. On a cold, hazy February morning, he landed in Beijing, the capital of a communist regime that America did not officially recognise, to meet China’s ailing tyrant, Mao Zedong. Listen to this story Your browser does not support the <audio> element. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android. The president’s stated motives were grandly visionary. China, home to a fifth of humanity, languished in angry isolation in 1972, its borders all but closed…
Feb 3rd 2022 BEIJING SPEAKING TO FOREIGN bigwigs at last month’s World Economic Forum, President Xi Jinping said that, to meet its many challenges, humanity must “act with the courage and strength” of a winged tiger. At home, however, the year of the tiger he welcomed on February 1st has not felt much like the winged variety. Chinese people are struggling to negotiate their third muted new year of the pandemic amid an array of ever-changing travel rules. Listen to this story Your browser does not support the <audio> element.…
Feb 3rd 2022 THE YEAR is 2035. You are walking along the Bund, Shanghai’s storied waterfront, with two of your old classmates, pointing out how much has changed since the last time you were here 20 years ago. You almost joke about how the only thing that never changes is Xi Jinping being in power, but you think better of it. Someone might be listening. A message flashes in your glasses, and you say hurried goodbyes. The landscape of the Bund dissolves into the fantasy realm of a multiplayer game,…
Advertisement Due to a combination of high vaccination rates and the more contagious Omicron variant, more and more developed countries are shifting to a “living with COVID-19” approach, lifting restrictions and accepting the virus as endemic. New Zealand and Singapore, both lauded for their COVID-19 containment efforts, have moved toward full reopening, counting on high vaccination rates to keep their populations safe. Taiwan, however, is bucking the trend and sticking with its zero-COVID strategy. Since an outbreak that began last May and peaked in June 2021, with 476 domestic cases…
When the leaders of China and Russia meet in Beijing this Friday shortly before the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, observers of the bilateral relationship will be looking for insights into how this 21st century quasi-alliance is reshaping the postwar world order. It was 50 years ago this month, on 21 February 1972, that the historic handshake between Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong changed the geometry of the cold war. Historians called the visit “the week that changed the world”. It later influenced Washington’s subsequent movement towards détente with…
China is seeking to stabilise relations with the US right now, points out Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia programme at the German Marshall Fund. If Beijing lent stronger support to Moscow, that “could create more tensions with the US, including a clearer democracy versus autocracy split,” she tells the BBC. BBC