China should not have been given the honour of hosting this year’s Winter Olympics. When Beijing hosted the summer Games in 2008, the prevailing hope was that engagement with China would lead to greater openness. Such views now look naive. Instead, the opposite has happened: while China’s economy has boomed, the last decade has seen a concerted crackdown on human rights, a centralisation of political power and creeping and extensive surveillance, as athletes and officials are now discovering.
This growing authoritarianism has reached new and sinister heights under President Xi Jinping, including the dismantling of Hong Kong’s democracy. Most horrific is the situation in Xinjiang, where there is extensive evidence of mass “re-education” camps, forced labour, forced sterilisation and cultural repression on an industrial scale against the Uyghur people. The appalling treatment of the Uyghurs has led our parliament and others around the world to recognise that China’s actions amount to genocide.
