China Wants You to Know It Doesn’t Care About Biden’s Summit and the Olympics Boycott

With the U.S. announcing a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics, the same week that President Joe Biden is set to host a democracy summit without China, authorities in Beijing and state media are in overdrive countering both diplomatic snubs.

On Monday, the White House announced the boycott, in which athletes will still be free to attend but an official delegation will not be sent, of the Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games in Beijing in February.

The move was to protest “egregious human rights abuses and atrocities” in Xinjiang, said White House press secretary Jen Psaki, adding that the U.S. government didn’t feel it right to “penalize athletes” by blocking them from competing. 

Later that day, Chinese state media started to hurl playground insults—a tactic that has become common in its commentary on the U.S. State-run news outlet Global Times claimed in a tweet that Chinese people are “relieved” about the boycott because fewer U.S. officials entering China means “fewer viruses will be brought in.”

The same outlet previously claimed that COVID-19 was brought to China through an American cyclist who took part in the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019. Chinese state media have been aggressive in countering the Wuhan lab-leak theory by pushing its own conspiracy that the virus escaped from U.S. military base Fort Detrick. 

“No one would care about whether they come or not,” Global Times tweeted in reference to politicians calling for a boycott of the Winter Olympics.

In a rare moment of domestic political cohesion, the diplomatic boycott has been lauded by both Republican and Democratic politicians in the U.S. Countries such as Canada, Australia, and Japan are also mulling potential boycotts of the Winter Olympics.

In China’s first official response to the boycott, foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a press conference on Tuesday that China will be taking countermeasures, adding that the Winter Olympics is not a stage for political antics and manipulation.

While on Chinese social media, the censors are hard at work regulating domestic discourse on the boycott. Searches for the phrase “Winter Olympics boycott” have been blocked, and the hashtag “uninvited U.S. politicians continue to hype boycotting the Beijing Winter Olympics” has gained immense traction, racking up over 2 billion views.

Tensions were already high between the superpowers after another recent snub to Beijing in the form of non-invitation to U.S. Summit for Democracy, set to be held virtually by President Joe Biden on Dec. 9 and 10.

With attendees from over 100 countries, the virtual summit will gather leaders from democracies around the world to discuss defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and promoting human rights. China and Russia were conspicuously absent from the list of attendees, while representatives from Taiwan were invited—a move that triggered backlash from Beijing, which considers the island as its territory.

The list of attendees stirred controversy generally, with countries like Singapore, Thailand, Egypt, and Turkey also left out. Speaking to reporters in Singapore, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink said that the summit is not meant to be a place where attendees “sit in judgment of other countries.”

In response to its exclusion from Biden’s summit, China held the International Forum on Democracy on Saturday with the stated goal of breaking the “monism” and “narrative hegemony” of U.S.-style democracy, Global Times reported.

During the forum, which according to state media featured hundreds of politicians and scholars from over 120 countries, Communist Party leaders emphasized the merits of China’s version of democracy while declaring U.S. democracy “seriously sick.”

There is no "one-size-fits-all" model of democracy, as a country’s politics is rooted in its own culture, said Huang Kunming, head of the Chinese Communist Party’s Publicity Department.

In the same speech, he described China’s socialist democracy as the most genuine and effective, while on the same day China’s State Council released a white paper titled China: Democracy that Works.

Chinese state media have run a series of op-eds denouncing Biden’s upcoming democracy summit. In a tweet, editor-in-chief of the Global Times Hu Xijin likened China's democracy to a “bonfire that has just flared up”, while describing the American one as “a pile of embers of a fading fire.”

This most recent trading of snubs between the world’s two largest economies comes amid mounting pressure on China regarding its human rights record.

Most recently, Peng Shuai, a women’s tennis player who has represented China at various tournaments, disappeared in November after alleging that she was sexually assaulted by former vice premier Zhang Gaoli.

She later reappeared in a video call that left many unconvinced about her safety, as fellow tennis players raised concerns about her whereabouts, and the World Tennis Association suspended its tournaments in China.

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