Beijing Winter Olympics and Chinese Government Sanctions

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that the 2022 Winter Olympic games should not be hosted in a country whose Government is credibly accused of mass atrocity crimes; and calls on the UK Government to decline invitations for its representatives to attend the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games unless the Government of the People’s Republic of China ends the atrocities taking place in the Xinjiang region and lifts the sanctions imposed on UK Parliamentarians, citizens and entities.

I presume the time limit does not apply to me, Madam Deputy Speaker. I must first declare an interest, as one of the sanctioned—I wear my badge of honour today—although any financial interest that I would have to declare would no doubt have been frozen by the Chinese Government. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for giving us time for this very important subject.

As a spotty school student back in 1980, I proposed a motion at a local school debating competition that the UK Government should not boycott the Moscow summer Olympics, following the invasion of Afghanistan over the previous Christmas, and that politics should be kept out of sport. As it turned out, Mrs Thatcher, the Prime Minister at the time, recommended a boycott, but it was left up to the individual sporting bodies whether they sent athletes from their sports to the games. Those who competed did so under the Olympic flag, and the few gold medals that we won were collected to the strains of the choral cantata that is the Olympic anthem. My overriding memory of those Olympic games was the image of Daley Thompson emotionally collecting his decathlon gold medal and belting out “God Save the Queen” to the tune of the rather dreary Olympic hymn. Sixty-five countries carried out a full boycott of the 1980 Olympics, including such strange bedfellows as the US and Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia, and China. China condemned the Russians, sent no athletes and subsequently did not appear on the medal table, so China really does not have a leg to stand on when it finds itself on the end of the same treatment that it meted out to its neighbour back in 1980.

My view on sporting boycotts and keeping politics out of sport has not changed, which is why this motion does not call for a full sporting boycott, which victimises most the elite athletes who dedicate so much to compete every four years, however niche the UK’s medal prospects might be at the winter Olympics compared with the summer version. But the simple reality is that in this day and age sport is inextricably linked with, and often tainted by, politics whether we like it or not, and that taint sometimes can be no greater than when the event is hosted under the Olympic banner.

Most countries will bid for the honour of hosting the Olympics so that they can showcase their nation to the world as an impressive player on the world stage—a land of progress and plenty, where everything is just rosy and all the criticisms that we hear about them are baseless propaganda. I am sure we were guilty of some of that when London hosted the 2012 Olympics, especially in the visually and financially extravagant opening and closing ceremonies, which reminded the world why the United Kingdom is the top nation. The difference was that our people were free to criticise that extravaganza if they disapproved. Our press was free to caricature or lampoon it, as some did, especially Paul McCartney’s singing, and we in this place were free to tackle Ministers about whether it was money well spent and whether we actually wanted it.

In the same way, hon. and right hon. Members in this House are free to speak out against abuses at home or abroad, human rights or otherwise, as freely happened, including with the recent reports by the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee on the Uyghur situation. In the same way, the House has spoken out about the grotesque oppression, torture and murder of more than a million peace-loving Tibetans at the hands of the Chinese Communist party since the occupation of 1959. In the same way, too, we have called out the industrial-scale human rights abuses against the Uyghur people—the slave labour camps in Xinjiang, the forced sterilisation of Uyghur woman—all leading to a motion unanimously passed in this House on 22 April, thanks to the good services of my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Ms Ghani), which called out those inhuman acts for what they are, namely, genocide, committed by the hand of the Chinese Communist Government, who in just 200 days’ time will be welcoming the world to the temporary mirage that is a free Beijing, as the goose-stepping battalions of the People’s Liberation Army take ownership of the Olympic rings and run the Olympic flag up their flagpole.

Any dissent, any protest and any adverse publicity will be cancelled, crushed and disappeared, just as the Chinese Government tried to suppress the free speech that is the hallmark of parliamentary democracy and to bully five Members of this House, including me, and two noble Lords, by responding to our exposé of their abuses by sanctioning us in the misguided belief that we would shut up and go away. Now we are apparently to be subject to China’s new counter-foreign sanctions law, too.

Of course, the opposite was true; we have been louder than ever. The crimes of the Chinese Government have been under more scrutiny in this place and beyond, as China’s counterproductive miscalculation of what democracy counts for in the west has instead acted as a recruiting sergeant for decent people across the globe determined to call the Chinese Government out as the murderous bully they are.

We should be in no doubt about the real agenda behind China’s enthusiasm to host the Olympics for the second time. The Chinese propaganda machine is being ratcheted up for this historic event, which will make the Chinese capital the first city to host both a summer and winter Olympic games. The spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Wang Wenbin, has been boasting that

“the majority of countries and people in the world recognise the fact that China’s human rights conditions are constantly improving and China has achieved notable progress in its human rights cause”—

a claim that would embarrass even the Iraqi spokesman Comical Ali, of Gulf war notoriety.

We know what the Chinese Government will use the Winter Olympics for, as they showed quite clearly at the summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008. They proudly boasted that with 105 Heads of State and Government there, it was the largest gathering of world leaders for a sporting event in world history—until 2012, that is. The People’s Liberation Army Navy Band performed the nationalistic “Welcome March” and goose-stepped across the arena. Some 56 Chinese children, representing supposedly the 56 ethnic groups of ethnic China in their respective costumes, danced across the arena to the strains of “Ode to the Motherland”, lip-synced by a nine-year-old to the pre-recorded voice of another girl who had been told that she was not pretty enough to appear on the stage. To add insult to injury, it later turned out that all 56 of those children claiming to be representatives of China’s diversity were, in fact, all Han Chinese.

The spectacular $100 million opening ceremony lasted four hours and nine minutes as the 91,000 audience enjoyed a panoply of everything Chinese. They saw everything the Chinese Communist party wanted them and the rest of the world to see. Indeed, that was made easier by the notorious use of weather modification technology to prevent clouds and rain—just one of the more extreme examples of the Chinese Communist party manipulating the environment.

It was feted as a spectacular and unforgettable ceremony. It was

“the spectacular to end all spectaculars and probably can never be bettered”,

in the mesmerised words of one Tony Blair, but it was all a sham. The awarding of the 2008 Olympics to Beijing was accompanied by the International Olympic Committee promising that the games would act as a catalyst for human rights reform in China. One widely acknowledged genocide in Xinjiang later; thousands of Tibetans arrested, imprisoned, displaced, tortured and killed later; the snuffing out of free speech, the free press and political freedom and the trashing of the Sino-British joint declaration and imposition of the national security law later—that went well, didn’t it?

To help win the 2008 Olympics, China promised to allow space for Chinese citizens to protest during the games. Spaces were indeed allocated, but those who applied for permission to protest were in fact arrested, making a mockery of the undertakings to the IOC, and no doubt the same will happen again next February, as China remains the world’s largest jailer of journalists.

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

I am delighted to be in the Chamber listening to this extremely important speech from my hon. Friend. Does he recall that we had our own contribution to the silencing of debate, sadly, at the time of the Olympics in London? Some of the so-called guards of the Olympic flame turned out to be operatives from the Ministry of State Security, and dealt with citizens and individuals in this country rather more brutally than we would ever tolerate of our own police.

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Furthermore, I remember mentioning in this House the fate of Tibetans who had been protesting in the Mall and were arrested and stuck behind crowds and, in some cases, had their homes raided by the police, and were arrested before they could go and protest. That is not the way we do things in this country, yet for some reason we kowtowed to the Chinese authorities at that stage. That must never be repeated, and we must not resile from calling out those sort of tactics, which the Chinese will use in their own country and wherever they can gain influence.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

I was reflecting on my hon. Friend’s earlier comments about the Olympics in Beijing. We were told in 2008, as I recall, that the awarding of the Olympics would be a key moment in the movement to get China to acknowledge and uphold human rights to a greater degree. That was in 2008. Does he think that it has made much progress?

[Tim Loughton]

That is exactly the point that I have been labouring to make. It was all a sham, and we all know how human rights in China have gone from bad to worse.

Back ahead of 2008, the Chinese authorities also had to clean up the environment around Beijing, as it looked at one stage as if everyone would have to compete in masks. Thirteen years on, China remains the world’s largest polluter, responsible for some 26% of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions. It has burnt more coal over the past 11 years than the rest of the world put together and now imperils the world’s third pole, the Tibetan plateau glaciers that service the water needs of billions of people. Of course, the energy needed to produce artificial snow in Beijing for the winter sports, as will be needed, will not exactly win any environmental awards.

Like it or not, China will make this global sporting event a global political spectacle. It is incredible, frankly, that the winter games were awarded to China in the first place, a sign of the much-too-cosy relationship between the Chinese Government, the IOC and its president, Thomas Bach, who during President Xi’s visit to the IOC headquarters in Lausanne back in 2017 claimed that he wanted to give the Chinese President a set of medals because

“he is the true Olympic champion for the youth”.

Yuck.

On virtually every level, the awarding of the games to China should never have happened. It flies in the face of the Olympic principles as encoded in the Olympics by the IOC, which states that

“Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles... The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity…sports organisations within the Olympic Movement shall apply political neutrality. They have the rights and obligations of autonomy, which include freely establishing and controlling the rules of sport, determining the structure and governance of their organisations, enjoying the right of elections free from any outside influence.”

Finally, it states:

“The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Olympic Charter shall be secured without discrimination of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”

How on earth does a genocidal, industrial scale human rights abusing, free speech intolerant and planet vandalising regime square with those principles?

In 2017, Xi Jinping claimed the international Olympic movement, in its over 100 years, had played a positive role in enhancing all-round human development, deepening friendship between nations, and promoting peace, development and progress. Everything that China has done since then and is still doing makes a mockery of that claim if the Beijing Olympics are allowed to go ahead in the form that the Chinese Communist party wants, its behaviour is allowed to be normalised, and it is allowed to score the major soft power propaganda victory it craves.

That is why a motion passed by this House urging a diplomatic boycott is so important, emphasising again that we will not turn a blind eye to industrial scale human rights abuses, and hopefully impressing on the Government the need to enact such a boycott so that no Ministers, diplomats, royal family members and other VIPs dance to the tune of the Chinese Communist party. The loss of face it will suffer will show how serious the United Kingdom is.

To date, the Chinese Government have taken no notice. Just last week, the Chinese tech giant Tencent’s WeChat social media platform deleted dozens of LGBT accounts, sparking fears of a crackdown on gay content online and gay rights generally, again in defiance of Olympic principles and echoing the actions of Russia suppressing LGBT organisations ahead of the 2014 Sochi winter Olympics.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I apologise for missing the first few seconds of what is a very powerful speech. I agree with every word the hon. Gentleman has said. He is completely right that the Chinese Government intend to use these winter Olympics as a propaganda exercise. Does he agree that it should be possible to turn this around if we—I just put this forward as an example—start referring to these winter Olympics as something like the “Genocide Games”?

[Tim Loughton]

If they are going to go ahead, that would be a very effective label to put on them to really force the point. The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point.

To go back the LGBT point I was making, remember that homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder in China until 2001 and earlier this year a Chinese court upheld a university’s description of homosexuality as a psychological disorder. How does that square with the principles I quoted in the Olympic charter?

There are also fears that Beijing merchandise will be made with Uyghur forced labour. I hope that the British sponsors of the games will have no truck with that if they continue to offer sponsorship and that some pressure may be applied there.

In bringing this motion before the House today, we are not alone. Through the good services of IPAC—the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China—and other like-minded organisations, motions are being put before the US House of Representatives, Parliaments in Germany, Canada, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Lithuania and others. On 8 June, the European Parliament passed a resolution calling on member states and the Commission to decline invitations to the games in the absence of human rights improvement. For once, the EU did the right thing and voted for that unanimously. US Secretary of State Blinken has already mooted a diplomatic boycott, which has incurred the wrath of China, while Congressman Tom Malinowski of the House Foreign Affairs Committee has said:

“The International Olympic Committee should not be validating the Chinese government’s international standing while that government is committing genocide and crimes against humanity. This coordinated effort by legislators in multiple democratic countries sends a message the IOC cannot ignore: if it can discuss postponing the Tokyo Games over public health concerns, it can certainly move the China games over the mass incarceration of millions in concentration camps.”

In return, when celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist regime earlier this month, President Xi cheerily threatened that any foreigners attempting to influence China

“will have their heads bashed…against the Great Wall of steel”.

President Xi can bash away all he likes, but this House must not and will not be bowed.

This House will soon be invited to vote on a motion calling for the UK Government to institute a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics. I hope that hon. and right hon. Members vote Aye and that the Government act on that strong hint. But it must mean something and it must lead to more action and consequences for China’s behaviour beyond just a 16-day sporting event in February.

The Foreign Secretary has been robust in his condemnation of industrial scale human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The sanctions against a small number of officials and the restrictions on businesses dealing in Xinjiang are welcome, but they must be just a small start to a much broader programme of tangible action co-ordinated with our allies who champion democracy and human rights. Today, I re-tabled my Tibet (Reciprocal Access) Bill and extended it to apply to Xinjiang. The US Congress unanimously passed the Bill on which it is based—why can’t we?

Earlier, we heard concerns about the proposed Chinese takeover of the UK’s largest semiconductor producer, which must surely be blocked under the powers that the Government have under the National Security and Investment Act 202.

I am coming to an end now, Madam Deputy Speaker, as I know you want me to. The latest move makes it even more imperative that we have a full, holistic audit of the throttling grip that the many tentacles of the Chinese state is taking in British boardrooms, on British research and infrastructure projects, on British university campuses and in British classrooms. When will the notorious Chen Quanguo, the architect of oppression in Tibet and genocide in Xinjiang, be added to the sanctions list, along with other Chinese Communist party officials and politicians?

Acting on the motion today is not a discretionary option. It is imperative, and we are duty bound legally. The UK is a party to the genocide convention. All state parties to the genocide convention are under an obligation to refrain from taking an active part in the crime of genocide and, additionally, to prevent the commission of genocide by others using all means reasonably available and within their power. That includes situations where one state alone would be unable to prevent genocide but where its actions in combination with the efforts of others may do so.

A diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics is a measure available to the UK that may contribute to preventing genocide from being committed in the Xinjiang region. That is precisely because the Olympics has been identified as a key pressure point on China. China is seeking to use the Olympics to portray a positive image to the world and has already threatened a robust response to the suggestion that US diplomats may decline to attend. Such comments reveal its acute sensitivity to the spotlight that a diplomatic boycott would shine on its human rights abuses, and highlight the corresponding leverage that the international community has.

We are therefore under an obligation to prevent and punish the crime of genocide, as set down in the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. This House has already determined that a very credible case exists that atrocities have been carried out by the Chinese Government against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, amounting to crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide. In passing the motion today, we will be therefore fulfilling our obligations and doing our job. I very much hope that the Minister will confirm that the Government will now take their obligations seriously and do their job by implementing the terms of the motion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton]

I am grateful to the Minister and to all hon. and right hon. Members who have made such impassioned speeches here today. I think we have spoken virtually as one voice, although I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton North East (Mark Logan) would want to put it on record that he is a funding patron of the UK National Committee on China. We have heard great phrases: sportswashing; the genocide Olympics, which it will become known as; and the veneer of diplomatic respectability. Let us reinforce the point that our argument is not with the people of China, but with the murderous regime of the Chinese Communist party Government.

I am glad no decisions have been made so far. I hope the Minister will take very seriously the clear words he has heard here today. May I say gently to the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock), that the enemy is not other democrats in this House? He has had a pop at the Government on several occasions, but the enemy is the Government of China, who are abusing their own people.

I go back to the principles of Olympism:

“The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Olympic Charter shall be secured without discrimination of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion.”

It is the people of China who are not allowed those privileges. It is for them that we are standing up. That is why we need a diplomatic and political boycott to make that point loud and clear. I hope that the House will pass the motion today.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House believes that the 2022 Winter Olympic games should not be hosted in a country whose Government is credibly accused of mass atrocity crimes; and calls on the UK Government to decline invitations for its representatives to attend the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games unless the Government of the People’s Republic of China ends the atrocities taking place in the Xinjiang region and lifts the sanctions imposed on UK Parliamentarians, citizens and entities.