This was published by the China Global South Project on 29 January 2022. China Foresight is affiliated with the China Global South Project and regularly provides opinion pieces for the weekly IDEAS China Global South newsletter. Click here to subscribe to the newsletter.

Over the past month, political leaders and Olympic committee officials from a dozen African countries have publicly expressed their support for China’s hosting of the Winter Olympics this February. On Tuesday, Nigeria’s President Buhari added his well wishes to the pile. The number of African countries plugging the Beijing Winter Olympics now outstrips the small handful that are actually sending athletes to the games. This comes on top of the joint declaration made at FOCAC 8 in November, which proclaimed that ‘Africa supports China in hosting the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.’

The U.S. and a number of other countries have announced their ‘diplomatic boycott’ (non-attendance of high-level government officials) of the games, which are set to begin next week, due to human rights concerns. China argues that the boycott is wrongly politicizing the Olympics and tarnishing the Olympic spirit. But the aspiration to depoliticize the Olympics is illusory. The Olympics have always been political – this applies in no short order to China, which sees the sports mega-event as a means of galvanizing greater international and domestic legitimacy for the CPC. A successful Winter Olympics will make Beijing the first city ever to host both the Winter and Summer Olympic Games. It will also appropriately set the stage for the city to convene the 20^th Party Congress later this year.

Although a ‘diplomatic boycott’ is a fairly vapid gesture, Beijing is clearly riled. On 21^st January, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said: ‘the Chinese side has stated repeatedly its position on the decision of a handful of western countries led by the US of not sending official or diplomatic representation to the Beijing Winter Olympics. They cannot represent the international community. Their acts will be rejected by people in all countries including athletes participating in the Beijing Winter Olympics’. In this context, the African words of support are invaluable to China. Similarly, Chinese media has publicized the support and attendance of the leaders of all five Central Asian countries. With these voices, China hopes to drown out the (mostly) Western criticism.

But the significance of the Olympics should be understood as something deeper than a platform for geopolitical bickering. Indeed, in many ways the Olympics speak to a complex nexus of large sporting events, accompanying infrastructure and regime legitimacy across the Global South. The allure of building large, prestigious infrastructure to put on display a government’s dedication to advancing a supposedly emancipatory development agenda, may easily distract from issues that are harder to resolve, such as inequality, inclusion or healthcare. In what some have dubbed ‘China’s stadium diplomacy’, Beijing has emerged as a key source of funding for lavish sporting facilities across the developing world. According to one study, China has supported the financing and construction of over 100 stadiums across the Global South, readily attempting to curry favour with local elites and – likely to a limited extent – local populations.

Despite this, recent calls for boycotts have likely hit a nerve in Beijing for another reason. Ahead of the 2008 summer Olympics, China became embroiled in a transnational human rights campaign directed against Beijing’s role in the Darfur conflict in Sudan. Publicly amplified by Hollywood celebrities Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg, NGOs connected the Beijing Olympics to the ongoing conflict in Darfur and China’s support for the Sudanese government in the UN Security Council. The relationship between the Olympics and China’s growing engagement across the Global South has thus long played a role in China’s attempts to frame itself as a responsible power.

The Global South has of course always been an active stakeholder in Olympic politics – leading to movements such as the last-minute boycott of the 1976 Montreal Olympics by around 30 African and Arab nations, opposing New Zealand’s sporting links to apartheid South Africa. As such, the decision by these countries to vocally support the Beijing Winter Olympics should not be taken for granted.

This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the China Foresight Forum, LSE IDEAS, nor The London School of Economics and Political Science.

The blog image, “2022 Winter Olympics cauldron at Yanqing Winter Olympic Cultural Square“, is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.