Why A China 2022 Olympics Boycott Could Save Countless Uyghur Lives

In fact, Beijing is never more vulnerable, and thus more amenable to pressure, than in the period before the Olympics. In the years leading up to the 2008 Olympics, Beijing was deeply worried about the global appeal and mobilizing powers of the Tibet issue. If the Dalai Lama was to call for a boycott of the games, it could deny China its moment of glory. So Beijing devised a strategy to preempt such a possibility. In 2002, it held out to the Dalai Lama a rare offer of dialogue. The Tibetan leadership earnestly participated in what it hoped would evolve into genuine negotiations. For Beijing, though, the dialogue was a tactical maneuver to forestall a sporting boycott. When the Tibetan uprising of March 2008 plunged the Olympics into controversy, the Dalai Lama supported the games—just as Beijing had hoped he would—because he did not want to derail the dialogue. Considering that Beijing developed the elaborate gimmick of a six-year-long Sino-Tibetan dialogue to stave off the specter of a boycott, it might very well close the Uyghur camps under the real threat of a boycott.

Therefore, before this window of opportunity closes, the United States should issue an ultimatum to China: close the camps or lose the games. To make this threat credible, multilateral coordination is crucial. The United States should coordinate with its allies and mobilize like-minded nations in advance, privately assuring potential recruits that the list of boycott signatories will be publicized only after a threshold has been crossed. The safety in numbers thus generated will deny China the ability to single out smaller nations for retaliation.

Some have questioned the effectiveness of sporting boycotts as instruments of coercion, highlighting how the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics failed to end the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But the two situations are hardly comparable. For one, the 1980 boycott was poorly coordinated—President Carter did not consult, much less mobilize, Western allies before announcing the U.S. decision. Secondly, in the Cold War world of 1980, there was no area of interest where the two superpowers shared common ground. In terms of security, ideology or the economy, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a zero-sum struggle. Neither had much leverage over the other.

This is not the case with China, whose interests converge with that of the United States in trade, the fight against climate change, and the preservation of the liberal order, of which China has been a major beneficiary. Moscow could afford to ignore America’s bumbling boycott without risking its global reputation and domestic legitimacy. But Beijing, whose interests are intertwined with those of the West, does not have the same luxury. Therefore, a well-coordinated international boycott of Beijing 2022 would have a far higher chance of success than the boycott of Moscow 1980 ever did.

Just as China’s spectacular rise tends to obscure the regime’s deep vulnerabilities, so too the sensationalist discourse on American decline that is in vogue today can obscure America’s vast reserves of power and influence. Humbled though it has been over the last year by domestic turmoil and a pandemic, America still remains the world’s preeminent power without whose vigilance the international rules-based order might be one genocide away from anarchy. The Xinjiang crisis provides America a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fortify the liberal order by redrawing the line between barbarism and civilization.

Tenzin Dorjee is senior researcher at the Tibet Action Institute and a PhD Candidate, Political Science at Columbia University.