China has told the US it will pay for its boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics on human rights grounds.
The White House said it would not send any government officials to the games in February 2022 because of the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses. The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhao Lijian told a press conference on Tuesday that the U.S. will pay for its wrongdoing. Zhao accused the U.S. of hypocrisy and called Western allegations of a cultural genocide of Uyghur Muslims a fabricated lie.
He said that the U.S. side tried to disrupt the Beijing Winter Olympics.
According to human rights groups and first-hand accounts, China has held 1 million Uyghurs and other minorities in internment camps where some are subject to forced labor, sterilization and torture. China denies this and says re-education camps are necessary to fight terrorism.
China is accused by the U.S. and other western powers of removing Hong Kong's democratic freedoms and is facing questions about tennis player Peng Shuai, who has not been seen in public for weeks after allegations of sexual assault against a former Chinese Communist Party official.
Zhao said that the American move to politicize the event was contrary to the Olympic Charter Principle that sports should maintain political neutrality. He warned the US that its position could harm the dialogue and cooperation in a number of important areas and our international regional issues. American athletes will still be able to participate in the games. President Joe Biden has been facing bipartisan pressure from lawmakers to take a stronger line on China, including calls for the U.S. to argue that the games should be moved.
Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of the Chinese state-affiliated Global Times newspaper, said it was super narcissistic to believe that the boycott was a powerful move, adding that many U.S. officials wouldn't be allowed in due to Covid 19 protocols.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has previously said that allies were consulted on a shared approach to a boycott, but other countries have been more cautious in mixing politics and sports.
The office of Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi told NBC News Italy would not boycott the games.
Canada s foreign ministry said on Monday that it remains deeply disturbed by the troubling reports of human rights violations in China and continues to discuss the matter with partners and allies.
New Zealand will not send ministers to the games, although it made a decision in October.
Grant Robertson, New Zealand's deputy prime minister, said that we had already made the decision that we weren't attending and we will continue to raise issues of human rights, which I note is what the U.S. are raising.
John Hoberman, professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has been researching the ethics of the Olympics since his 1986 book The Olympic Crisis: Sport, Politics, and the Moral Order, critical of the U.S. boycott for not going far enough.
He told NBC News that this is less than a half measure because people don't tune into the Olympics to watch diplomats. If you keep your diplomats out, you are giving a kind of soft blow to the Chinese regime.