The failed boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympics hangs over this year’s boycott

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The calls for a boycott got louder and louder. In Western capitals, foreign policy hawks and human rights advocates joined to push a boycott of the Olympic Games in Beijing. U.S. lawmakers cited links in an alleged genocide and abuses against a minority as moral justification for staying away.

I am not writing about the Beijing Winter Olympics, due to start later this week. I am referring instead to the international calls for a boycott of the 2008 Summer Olympics, also held in the Chinese capital.

Fourteen years ago, all eyes were on China as the host of the world’s preeminent international sporting event, just as they are again now. The 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics have since been viewed as a singular landmark, the moment when China finally was reborn as a “global superpower.” China has changed in a variety of ways since then, as The Post’s Eva Dou recently catalogued.

But despite the significant changes to China’s economy, society and politics, there are also parallels between the boycott movement that sprung up before the 2008 Games and the one that’s just occurred ahead of this year’s Games. There is one major difference: The movement for a boycott in 2008 did not succeed.

Instead, President George W. Bush attended the Opening Ceremonies, along with more than 80 other heads of state or government from around the world. During his trip to the Chinese capital, Bush cheered on the American swimming team and caused a stir by slapping the back of a player of the U.S. women’s beach volleyball team. He also met China’s vice president: a then-55-year-old Xi Jinping.

This year, President Biden will not be in attendance. Nor will any other U.S. government official. A number of nations, including the United States, Australia, Britain and Canada, are taking part in a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympic Games, citing China’s human rights abuses.

Why did calls for a boycott fail in 2008? There was no shortage of high-profile support for the move, even in the United States. More than 100 U.S. lawmakers signed a letter calling for a boycott. Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama, then sparring as Republican and Democratic candidates to be the next president, both indicated they would not attend the Games if they were president.

“If Chinese policies and practices do not change, I would not attend the opening ceremonies. It does no service to the Chinese government, and certainly no service to the people of China, for the United States and other democracies to pretend that the suppression of rights in China does not concern us. It does, will and must concern us,” the late McCain said in a statement before the Games.

Other high-profile leaders at the time, including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk all skipped the Opening Ceremonies. Anti-China protests in London and Paris upstaged the legs of an international torch relay, prompting anxious remarks from International Olympic Committee officials.

However, the narrative began to shift during the Games, as the presence of Bush and other European leaders may have helped ensure. (Brown actually attended the Closing Ceremonies). China won more gold medals than the United States; it even managed to clear the air with factory closures and traffic bans to battle back the city’s then-trademark smog.

At the time, Chinese state repression of the Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority group, was not the global issue that it is now. But there was no shortage of other human rights issues in China that raised alarms. Chief among them was repression in Tibet, highlighted by Beijing’s violent crackdown on monks and nuns calling for greater autonomy. Accounts suggest many were killed or “disappeared” by security forces; the region was closed off to outsiders afterward.

The United States last year declared China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims a genocide, pointing to a campaign of mass detention and sterilization in the Xinjiang region — a considerable escalation of the charges against the Chinese government.

But in 2008, Beijing had also been linked to genocide, accused of aiding mass killings in the western Sudan region of Darfur by buying oil from Sudan as President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s government was accused of atrocities in a conflict that led to the deaths of at least 300,000 people in the region.

Hope for cooperation put this all aside. “In the long run, America better remain engaged with China and understand that we can have a cooperative and constructive, yet candid, relationship,” Bush told NBC News during his 2008 visit to Beijing. “It’s really important for future presidents to understand the relationship between China and the region, and it’s important to make sure that America is engaged with China, even though we may have some disagreements.”

“This is China’s coming out party,” Michael Green, an Asia expert and former Bush administration official, told the New York Times in March 2008. If Bush boycotted the Olympics, Green said, “it would be such a loss of face for China that it would make working with them on issues from North Korea to human rights much more difficult.”

IOC officials have been even more open about their idea that participation in the Olympics can help convince countries to make crucial reforms. Dick Pound, a senior IOC official, once wrote that the 2001 decision to grant China the Beijing Olympics “was made in the hope of improvement in human rights and, indeed, the Chinese themselves said that having the games would accelerate progress in such matters.”

There is no real evidence that a boycott 14 years ago would have set the country on a different path. But there is now obvious evidence that the hope that engagement would lead to human rights improvements was misplaced. And it was obvious to many even before 2008.

The year before Beijing hosted the Summer Games, Sebastian Mallaby observed that hopes for Western engagement with China were undermined by China’s own engagement with Bashir’s Sudan. “The West is engaging with China on the theory that economic modernization will bring political modernization as well; otherwise, the West would merely be assisting the development of a communist adversary,” Mallaby, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote for The Post in 2007.

“China’s Sudan policy is an assertion that this link between economic and political modernization is by no means inevitable, even in the extreme case,” he continued. “You can construct oil refineries, educate scientists, build ambitious new railways — and simultaneously pursue a policy of genocide.”

It appears you can host the Olympics, too.

Washington News