The backlash arrives for Beijing Olympics
The China Letter: February 8, 2021
The news cycle shifted from looking back on the coronavirus outbreaks of a year ago to considering how the Olympics might play in China a year from now. Will growing attention to the repression of Muslim minorities affect the games—or will it be the other way around? We’ll continue to track these stories and more in this weekly email.
A preview of winter 2022
The human rights groups calling on governments to boycott the Beijing 2022 games aren’t finding a sympathetic ear in International Olympic Committee mainstay Dick Pound, who believes that these actions have historically only hurt the athletes. Thomas Bach, president of the IOC, issued a statement one year ahead of the games:
Construction of the Beijing athletes village features a banner that reads “not stop for a single moment; not err in a single step; not delay a single day,” as the Chinese capital and neighbouring city of Zhangjiakou plans to host 109 events over 12 days. But a peek at how Chinese state media will cover it was glimpsed in its reaction to the resistance:
The BBC’s Uighur reality
Britan’s public broadcaster was the latest to highlight the truth of what’s happening in the Xinjiang region, with a report that U.K. government minister Nigel Adams raised in parliament for showing “clearly evil acts.” It also got on the Joe Biden’s radar, as the president pledged to fight Chinese aggression during a foreign policy speech.
“I’m not going to do it the way Trump did. We are going to focus on the international rules of the road,” Biden said in an interview with CBS, noting that competition is inevitable. An early test for the U.S. administration came in calling for Beijing to both condemn the military coup in Myanmar and refrain from escalating its own hostilities in Taiwan.
An arrest is now exposed
Cheng Lei was locked up in Beijing without a lawyer for six months that Chinese law allows. But now that arrest for “illegally supplying state secrets overseas” is confirmed, her family is speaking out. Cheng is an Australian who was working in China for English-language channel CGTN, whose licence was recently pulled in the U.K.
Hong Kong forces a hand
After it was revealed that Hong Kong authorities forced a choice of nationality on a dual-citizen in prison, Canada said foreign students from there can apply for work permits as the U.K. also opens its gates to those fleeing the national security law. But kids growing up in Hong Kong will now be taught the law, including through cartoons:
Boys to be even manlier men
Young males who have become too “delicate, timid and effeminate” after being schooled by mostly women teachers were raised as a concern by a government advisor, whose idea of using gym classes to change that has now been approved. Sociologists expressed their outrage about this war on femininity.
The last words, for now
Gao Liu is a singer and actress who used the Weibo social media platform to inform her five million followers that her several months of disappearance from public view was due to a “cosmetic surgical incident.” The photos showed darkened dead flesh on the tip of her nose, which was the result of necrosis that can’t be rectified for yet another year:
The China Letter is produced by the Canadian Freedom Institute, a think tank based in Canada. We produce the China Letter every week to keep you informed and to press the ideas of free markets and free people not only in China but around the world. Please consider donating to keep this newsletter running!