Beijing Winter Olympics and Chinese Government Sanctions

Gavin Newlands Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP) [V]]

I congratulate the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) on bringing this very important debate before us today, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting it. We have heard a lot of fantastic speeches with a lot of great points made, none more so than the closing remarks of the hon. Member for Wealden (Ms Ghani). She was an extra speaker, and we were very grateful to hear from her because her closing remarks hit the nail on the head.

We have heard a lot recently from many about how sport and politics do not mix, but with all due respect, that is rubbish. The international community came together —well, in the most part—and isolated apartheid South Africa from international sport until it gave full human rights to all its citizens. I say “in the most part” because there were still those who regurgitated the phrase “sport and politics don’t mix”, even while the rest of the world stood against obvious injustice and repression in South Africa. Of course, sport should be free of state interference and political parties or figures meddling in its day-to-day organisation, but that does not mean that we cannot apply political ideals such as human rights and liberal democracy to the governance of sport and to where governing bodies choose to hold events.

Those ideals were thrown under a bus when the 2022 Winter Olympics were awarded to Beijing. We now know from leaked Chinese Communist party documents that, even before the games were awarded in 2015, the Uyghur people were the target of systematic and brutal repression. The party’s general secretary called for a period of painful interventional treatment, education and transformation. That education and treatment has involved up to 2 million people being detained, used as slave labour and forcibly sterilised, and the Muslim population forced to drink alcohol and eat pork as part of their so-called education. That is undisguised, unmitigated barbarity at a scale we have not seen on this continent since the second world war. Those are crimes against humanity, which the rest of the world has a moral duty to stand up against. We must deny the Chinese Government’s attempts to bask in the warm glow of international sport.

The SNP supports the calls for the UK Government to withhold support for the event by not sending any Government officials, politicians or members of the royal family. Of course, it is always solely for the Olympic associations to take decisions about the attendance of athletes themselves. We encourage the UK Government and the international community to call out the egregious human rights abuses being committed against the Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang. We note that the international community did that most recently at the UN Human Rights Council. The UN human rights commissioner or another independent fact-finding body must be given unfettered access to Xinjiang. The genocide in Xinjiang and the human rights abuses elsewhere must not escape an international response.

In a report published last week, as has been referenced, the Foreign Affairs Committee called for big boy politics on China. Boycotting the games was one of the manifold recommendations it made to the UK Government, who have so far dragged their feet on robust action on China. Last week, Members of the European Parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on diplomatic officials to boycott the ’22 Winter Olympics in response to continuing human rights abuses by the Chinese Government. It was passed by 578 votes to 29 and was supported by all of Europe’s mainstream political groups, including the centre-right European People’s Party—the group of the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel—and the centrists of France’s Emmanuel Macron. The resolution calls for EU officials and member states to decline all Government and diplomatic invitations to the Winter Olympics unless the Chinese Government demonstrate a verifiable improvement in the human rights situation in Hong Kong, the Xinjiang Uyghur region, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and elsewhere in China.

The Prime Minister, when asked about a boycott, recently said:

“I am instinctively, and always have been, against sporting boycotts.”—[Official Report, 7 July 2021; Vol. 698, c. 901.]

That is not the question that was asked of him or what the motion before us seeks.

As we saw during the back-and-forward with the genocide amendment to the Trade Act 2021, the Government cannot be trusted to stand up for human rights when push comes to shove. The global community has failed to stand up to human rights abuses in the past that have coincided in time and location with prominent sporting events, and that mistake should not and must not be repeated. The UK Government have a moral responsibility to diplomatically boycott the games, which in many ways will be used as a propaganda tool for a regime committing genocide. It must be remembered that the CCP is a master of propaganda.

It seems pretty clear, from the speeches today and various other remarks outside this Chamber, that the Government are somewhat isolated in their thinking. That being said, we support the UK’s action to sanction Chinese Government officials for crimes committed in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. The SNP welcomed the UK Government’s decision to begin to impose Magnitsky-style sanctions, but there are few Chinese leaders involved in abuses on the current list.

A report by the Foreign Affairs Committee notes that the Government’s

“current framework of UK policy towards China reflects an unwillingness to face this reality”

of widespread and merciless state-sanctioned abuse. Wider trade sanctions are necessary to avoid UK corporate and consumer complicity and to hit the Chinese economy.

As the US has done, the Government should ban the import of all cotton products known to be produced in whole or in part in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, in line with WTO rules. We also believe the ban should be extended to other industries where abuses are known to be taking place: namely in tomato, protective personal equipment and solar panel production. The Department for International Trade should publish an urgent review of the export controls that apply to Xinjiang, because currently we have no import controls whatever in place to prevent goods from Xinjiang arriving on our shelves, despite the Prime Minister’s claim to the contrary.

It is sad in a debate about the winter Olympics not to be concentrating on the sport itself, the athletic endeavour and the sheer hard work that athletes have put in over the previous four years in preparation for the competition. Of course this country has not had the success in the winter version of the games that it has had in the summer games, but growing up I well remember the exploits of Rhona Martin and her team on the curling rink and their gold in Salt Lake City, of Torvill and Dean—well, their comeback, because I am too young to remember their initial “Bolero” dance in 1984—and of Eddie the Eagle and many others.

Sadly, because of the abhorrent situation in Xinjiang, alongside the Chinese Government’s gradual erosion of civil liberties in Hong Kong and what we already know about the decades-long suppression of democracy and freedom of expression in China, and the incomprehensible decision by the IOC, we are talking about something far different and far darker. When the current IOC president says that his organisation must stay out of politics—an echo of his Francoist predecessor and all those who supported apartheid South Africa’s sporting links with other countries—we can see the challenges that those who support human rights and dignity are up against.

The IOC website has the temerity to claim:

“At all times, the IOC recognises and upholds human rights, as enshrined in both the Fundamental Principles of the Olympic Charter and the IOC Code of Ethics.”

Only an institutionally arrogant organisation can make those claims and yet award next year’s games to China, but this is not just an issue for the IOC. Too many international governing bodies have been happy to turn a blind eye to repression and state-sponsored violence when choosing who to host their latest event. One only has to remember the uproar when FIFA awarded World cups to Russia and Qatar.

In conclusion, I fear that we or, rather, the IOC and sport’s governing bodies are too far down the track for next year’s winter Olympics to be moved, but that should not stop future bids for Olympics and other major sporting events from being assessed not just on their stadia capacity or segregated car lanes for VIPs, but on their human rights record and their treatment of their own citizens. History shows that the IOC has not been fussy in the past about who leads them—installing a senior member of Franco’s Falangists as their president should still be a source of shame—but it has a chance in future games to properly incorporate human rights into any assessment of candidate cities in future and to put humanity, rather than cold hard cash, at the heart of sport.