In less than a month, the Beijing Winter Olympic Games will take place. In holding the Olympic Games, the International Olympic Committee has a duty and a responsibility to realize the ethical principles of the Olympic Charter, namely upholding human dignity and creating a peace-loving society in the host country.
The IOC has not fulfilled this duty. Instead, in hosting the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, they are collaborating with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), an increasingly totalitarian regime that shows contempt for basic human rights. Worse, the CCP has established a system of mass internment and oppression in Xinjiang aimed at destroying the Uyghur people. Millions of Uyghurs are locked up in concentration camps and tortured, raped, forcibly sterilized, and even killed. In Tibet, whose culture has resisted colonization by China for over 60 years, similar measures are increasingly being applied.
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, freedom and democratic rights have been blatantly repressed. Opposition party members, which in previous years won a majority of votes in every general election, have been imprisoned or forced into exile after mass arrests. The city is now ruled by a puppet regime that has shed the facade of autonomy, follows orders directly from Beijing, and in no way represents the interests of its people.
The CCP even silences and enforces the disappearance of Olympic athletes, as shown by the recent case of Chinese tennis champion Peng Shuai, who mysteriously retracted her allegation of sexual assault against a CCP official after vanishing for weeks. Mass detention and surveillance, torture, children forcibly separated from parents, suppression of the LGBTQ movement, so-called “patriotic education” that instils hatred of foreign countries: these are the norm in China.
So, we are asking for your help. We know you have devoted so much time and energy to qualify and participate at the Olympics. But it is no exaggeration to say that life under the rule of the Chinese regime literally means death for many people.
The 2022 Beijing Olympics are still a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. An opportunity for athletes to make history, change the world and work for something greater: humanity.
We appeal to you to use your position to stand on the right side of history and say no to an event that has degenerated into a propaganda tool for a totalitarian regime, just as the 1936 Berlin Summer Games once were.
A human life is worth more than bloodstained medals. We hope that you will refuse to participate in the Beijing Genocide Games. On the other hand, should you decide to participate, we hope that you will not remain in complicit silence, but use your influence to raise awareness of the plight of thousands silenced under the CCP’s tyrannical rule. Make human rights a central theme of this Winter Olympics.
