Beijing Winter Olympics and Chinese Government Sanctions

Tom Tugendhat Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that the 2022 Winter Olympic games should not be hosted in a country whose Government is credibly accused of mass atrocity crimes; and calls on the UK Government to decline invitations for its representatives to attend the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games unless the Government of the People’s Republic of China ends the atrocities taking place in the Xinjiang region and lifts the sanctions imposed on UK Parliamentarians, citizens and entities.

I presume the time limit does not apply to me, Madam Deputy Speaker. I must first declare an interest, as one of the sanctioned—I wear my badge of honour today—although any financial interest that I would have to declare would no doubt have been frozen by the Chinese Government. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for giving us time for this very important subject.

As a spotty school student back in 1980, I proposed a motion at a local school debating competition that the UK Government should not boycott the Moscow summer Olympics, following the invasion of Afghanistan over the previous Christmas, and that politics should be kept out of sport. As it turned out, Mrs Thatcher, the Prime Minister at the time, recommended a boycott, but it was left up to the individual sporting bodies whether they sent athletes from their sports to the games. Those who competed did so under the Olympic flag, and the few gold medals that we won were collected to the strains of the choral cantata that is the Olympic anthem. My overriding memory of those Olympic games was the image of Daley Thompson emotionally collecting his decathlon gold medal and belting out “God Save the Queen” to the tune of the rather dreary Olympic hymn. Sixty-five countries carried out a full boycott of the 1980 Olympics, including such strange bedfellows as the US and Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia, and China. China condemned the Russians, sent no athletes and subsequently did not appear on the medal table, so China really does not have a leg to stand on when it finds itself on the end of the same treatment that it meted out to its neighbour back in 1980.

My view on sporting boycotts and keeping politics out of sport has not changed, which is why this motion does not call for a full sporting boycott, which victimises most the elite athletes who dedicate so much to compete every four years, however niche the UK’s medal prospects might be at the winter Olympics compared with the summer version. But the simple reality is that in this day and age sport is inextricably linked with, and often tainted by, politics whether we like it or not, and that taint sometimes can be no greater than when the event is hosted under the Olympic banner.

Most countries will bid for the honour of hosting the Olympics so that they can showcase their nation to the world as an impressive player on the world stage—a land of progress and plenty, where everything is just rosy and all the criticisms that we hear about them are baseless propaganda. I am sure we were guilty of some of that when London hosted the 2012 Olympics, especially in the visually and financially extravagant opening and closing ceremonies, which reminded the world why the United Kingdom is the top nation. The difference was that our people were free to criticise that extravaganza if they disapproved. Our press was free to caricature or lampoon it, as some did, especially Paul McCartney’s singing, and we in this place were free to tackle Ministers about whether it was money well spent and whether we actually wanted it.

In the same way, hon. and right hon. Members in this House are free to speak out against abuses at home or abroad, human rights or otherwise, as freely happened, including with the recent reports by the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee on the Uyghur situation. In the same way, the House has spoken out about the grotesque oppression, torture and murder of more than a million peace-loving Tibetans at the hands of the Chinese Communist party since the occupation of 1959. In the same way, too, we have called out the industrial-scale human rights abuses against the Uyghur people—the slave labour camps in Xinjiang, the forced sterilisation of Uyghur woman—all leading to a motion unanimously passed in this House on 22 April, thanks to the good services of my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Ms Ghani), which called out those inhuman acts for what they are, namely, genocide, committed by the hand of the Chinese Communist Government, who in just 200 days’ time will be welcoming the world to the temporary mirage that is a free Beijing, as the goose-stepping battalions of the People’s Liberation Army take ownership of the Olympic rings and run the Olympic flag up their flagpole.

Any dissent, any protest and any adverse publicity will be cancelled, crushed and disappeared, just as the Chinese Government tried to suppress the free speech that is the hallmark of parliamentary democracy and to bully five Members of this House, including me, and two noble Lords, by responding to our exposé of their abuses by sanctioning us in the misguided belief that we would shut up and go away. Now we are apparently to be subject to China’s new counter-foreign sanctions law, too.

Of course, the opposite was true; we have been louder than ever. The crimes of the Chinese Government have been under more scrutiny in this place and beyond, as China’s counterproductive miscalculation of what democracy counts for in the west has instead acted as a recruiting sergeant for decent people across the globe determined to call the Chinese Government out as the murderous bully they are.

We should be in no doubt about the real agenda behind China’s enthusiasm to host the Olympics for the second time. The Chinese propaganda machine is being ratcheted up for this historic event, which will make the Chinese capital the first city to host both a summer and winter Olympic games. The spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Wang Wenbin, has been boasting that

“the majority of countries and people in the world recognise the fact that China’s human rights conditions are constantly improving and China has achieved notable progress in its human rights cause”—

a claim that would embarrass even the Iraqi spokesman Comical Ali, of Gulf war notoriety.

We know what the Chinese Government will use the Winter Olympics for, as they showed quite clearly at the summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008. They proudly boasted that with 105 Heads of State and Government there, it was the largest gathering of world leaders for a sporting event in world history—until 2012, that is. The People’s Liberation Army Navy Band performed the nationalistic “Welcome March” and goose-stepped across the arena. Some 56 Chinese children, representing supposedly the 56 ethnic groups of ethnic China in their respective costumes, danced across the arena to the strains of “Ode to the Motherland”, lip-synced by a nine-year-old to the pre-recorded voice of another girl who had been told that she was not pretty enough to appear on the stage. To add insult to injury, it later turned out that all 56 of those children claiming to be representatives of China’s diversity were, in fact, all Han Chinese.

The spectacular $100 million opening ceremony lasted four hours and nine minutes as the 91,000 audience enjoyed a panoply of everything Chinese. They saw everything the Chinese Communist party wanted them and the rest of the world to see. Indeed, that was made easier by the notorious use of weather modification technology to prevent clouds and rain—just one of the more extreme examples of the Chinese Communist party manipulating the environment.

It was feted as a spectacular and unforgettable ceremony. It was

“the spectacular to end all spectaculars and probably can never be bettered”,

in the mesmerised words of one Tony Blair, but it was all a sham. The awarding of the 2008 Olympics to Beijing was accompanied by the International Olympic Committee promising that the games would act as a catalyst for human rights reform in China. One widely acknowledged genocide in Xinjiang later; thousands of Tibetans arrested, imprisoned, displaced, tortured and killed later; the snuffing out of free speech, the free press and political freedom and the trashing of the Sino-British joint declaration and imposition of the national security law later—that went well, didn’t it?

To help win the 2008 Olympics, China promised to allow space for Chinese citizens to protest during the games. Spaces were indeed allocated, but those who applied for permission to protest were in fact arrested, making a mockery of the undertakings to the IOC, and no doubt the same will happen again next February, as China remains the world’s largest jailer of journalists.

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

I am delighted to be in the Chamber listening to this extremely important speech from my hon. Friend. Does he recall that we had our own contribution to the silencing of debate, sadly, at the time of the Olympics in London? Some of the so-called guards of the Olympic flame turned out to be operatives from the Ministry of State Security, and dealt with citizens and individuals in this country rather more brutally than we would ever tolerate of our own police.

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Furthermore, I remember mentioning in this House the fate of Tibetans who had been protesting in the Mall and were arrested and stuck behind crowds and, in some cases, had their homes raided by the police, and were arrested before they could go and protest. That is not the way we do things in this country, yet for some reason we kowtowed to the Chinese authorities at that stage. That must never be repeated, and we must not resile from calling out those sort of tactics, which the Chinese will use in their own country and wherever they can gain influence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

It is a great privilege to speak in this debate. It echoes some of the comments that the Foreign Affairs Committee, which I am privileged to chair—one fellow member of the Committee, the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer), is here with us today—was able to put into the report that we published only a few days ago, “Never Again: The UK’s Responsibility to Act on Atrocities in Xinjiang and Beyond”.

In that report, we looked at the Olympics, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) said, because of course they ask some very specific questions of us. It is not just that they are a global event and therefore an opportunity for PR, for awareness, for broadcast, for propaganda even. The Olympics are much more than that. They were, of course, reinvented in the 19th century, but their origins go back to the idea of competition as an avoidance of war. Their origins go, indeed, to the origins of our own civilisations, emerging as they did from the great Greek city states.

The Olympics set, in a constructive and organised fashion, a set of rules—a set of structures—that allowed people to compete equally and fairly among one other. That is a huge achievement. It is a quite remarkable achievement when we think how early it happened. It took a long time before we saw that same peaceful competition in trade, ideas, innovation and technology in our world. In fact, that really only emerged after the last war—in the last 80 years—and it has only really come to fruition since the fall of the cold war and the end of the Soviet occupation of so much of the world. It is quite a remarkable achievement that in 30 years we have been competing on the basis of rules, not force.

So this event really does matter, because this event reinforces that point that the rules matter, fairness matters, equal opportunity matters, access matters, voice matters—and the truth matters. Sadly, my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham has already cited so many areas where the truth points in a direction that Beijing wishes it did not.

That is a great shame. It is a great shame not just for the people of China, who are of course the first prisoners of the Chinese Communist party, and for the people of the region, who of course suffer from the numerous abuses and indignities that the Chinese state has been imposing upon them; it is actually a shame for the entire world. It is a shame for us in this country, despite the freedoms we enjoy and the luxuries we are blessed with, because we lose out.

We lose out on the ability to share equally and fairly with a people that has given the world so much: 5,000 years of amazing civilisation emerging from that extraordinary plateau around the Yangtze valley and from the emergence of ideas, people, culture and economics. What wealth came from those people, what ideas have the people of China given humanity, and what richness have we enjoyed from their imaginations, minds and freedoms. So we all lose when they lose. We all suffer when their ideals are stolen, we all suffer when their innovation is silenced and their culture is curtailed, and we all suffer when their voices are locked away, and that is what we are seeing today.

There are few ways in which the UK can respond directly. It would be wrong politically, militarily, economically, socially and culturally to threaten force. It would be wrong to seek to punish individuals whose crime is simply to be citizens of a dictatorial state—they are already punished enough—and that makes it very difficult to know how to respond. However, one way we can respond is by standing up and making it clear that we do not accept the legitimacy of the regime, and that we do not accept its right to so change the truth and so violate the reality of the world in which we live that it can use the ultimate evidence—the ultimate moment of propaganda—of the global success of rules, fairness and integrity, and twist, contort and divert it to its own nefarious ends.

So I think we should attend the games, but only as athletes, and at the moments when the games have a propaganda element—at the beginning or at the end—we only need a single athlete to hold a single flag to make clear the point that the team stand together against this tyranny. In seeing that single individual, it will be clear to the world that Britain’s voice is there and present at the games, but not participating in the propaganda gains that go with them.

These are going to be difficult decisions for the Government, because they have to factor in many different areas. Sometimes people say that gesture politics is no politics. I would say no. I would say that this is a gesture that does make a difference. It is a gesture that defends the rules that keep us all safe, defends the cultures that keep us all free and defends our own ability to co-operate fairly and to avoid conflict. The rules matter: they make us richer, they make us safer, they protect Britain, they protect our friends and, if they are allowed to, they will once again protect the people of China.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate; I thank my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) for securing it. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

I had a discussion last year with the UK Olympic committee. I had been making a bit of a fuss about why we were holding the Olympics, so they asked to come and see me. They asked what my position was. I said, “Look, as far as I am concerned, it is up to individual athletes what they choose to do. I would like them to understand where they are going and what they will be involved in. I expect the Government to take a position, and I expect they will take the view that attending, giving the games diplomatic credibility and having UK officials, Ministers and so on at the games is no longer feasible given the nature of the Chinese Communist party regime.” That was before a lot of the stuff that we now know came out. The committee’s reaction was, “We could live with that. We can understand that. That’s fair. We won’t complain about that. We understand why you would do that and leave it to individual athletes.”

My view is reinforced by what we know now. Since that conversation, Adrian Zenz laid bare the evidence of the abuses through the documentation he produced showing that the Uyghur atrocity is really a genocide. We eventually managed to publish that through the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China and other institutions. We also know much more about the forced labour camps in Tibet, where we think there are 1.5 million or even more than 2 million people. My hon. Friend deserves due credit for raising that long after anyone else cared again to raise it. The list goes on. The Chinese Government are aggressive abroad and aggressive at home. They have killed Indian soldiers as they seek to dispute the border with India, they have taken over the South China sea even though the UN has said they have no historical right over the area, and they have threatened and continue to threaten Taiwan.

My hon. Friend the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee was in his place for the urgent question earlier about the UK semiconductor company to be sold to a Chinese company. One thing I did not raise but we know is that China has strategically said that semiconductor production must come to China and that it must dominate globally. More importantly, it wants to use that production as a weapon against Taiwan, which is probably the biggest single producer of semiconductors. China wants to stop that cash flow to Taiwan, so one of China’s reasons for taking over the UK company is to increase its own capability and stop Taiwan. Not a single thing that the Chinese Communist party does has not been thought through to the final degree. It knows where it is going, and it does not even hide it. It was said that the Chinese Government threaten that anybody who affronts them will have their head bashed against a wall of steel. I do not think that when something like that is said, everybody laughs. Imagine if the British Government were to say that about anybody who disagreed with them. We would all be up in arms and everybody around the free world would be complaining.

[Tom Tugendhat]

I am delighted to support my right hon. Friend in his powerful speech. Does he remember the words of the Chinese ambassador to Stockholm, who said only a few months ago:

“We treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we have shotguns”?

Has he ever heard another diplomat use such language?

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

No, I really have not. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise that. The funny thing about the Chinese Government is that President Xi says exactly what he is going to do and, intriguingly, he does it. Sadly, Governments such as my own to some degree and those around the western world think he does not really mean it, and they hope that, because he did not mean it, there will be a different outcome. They make stupid excuses such as to say, “Do you know what? If we give them these games, they will uphold human rights.” That is what they did in 2018, and I do not recall much of that. Then they say, “Don’t worry. If we trade more with China in a golden decade, they will liberalise their politics and head towards democracy.” That is what was done in a Government of which I as a member.

I tell hon. Members who is naive in all of this: it is all of us. It is the western democracies who set policy for what they wish would happen. They do not remember the history of the 1930s. We have forgotten what happened when we appeased another ghastly dictatorship: 60 million people died as a result of our failure, and we are bound on the same course today.

This debate today about boycotting the Olympics is not just a token; we know that China is sensitive when it gets global criticism, when people shine a torch on what goes there. We know that it reacts. Why do we know that? Because it sanctions people such as myself and many of my colleagues in this Chamber and in the European Parliament.

I applaud the Members of the European Parliament and the members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China who have been sanctioned, because they have stopped the European Union having a trade arrangement. What have we done? Our Government now talk about doing more trade arrangements, while we sit here as sanctioned individuals. I want the Government to act. It is simply not good enough for us, on the one hand, to say that we are horrified about what China does, and then, on the other, to make plans to seek more trade relationships with it and to say that we do not want to interfere with the Olympics.

Everything is political in a communist regime. Every single aspect of people’s lives is governed by a communist political regime. Our Government must recognise that they are no longer dealing with a decent organisation that would uphold freedoms; they are dealing with a dictatorial, militaristic, intolerant and oppressive regime. Every time that we give China public demonstrations such as the Olympics, we do ourselves and, worse, the Uyghurs, the Tibetans and all those oppressed people a disfavour. Let us stand up for freedom, democracy and human rights and not back these games.