Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

China is right to laugh at the west

(Getty)

Signs of the enervating weakness of the west’s governing elites aren’t that hard to find but the case of the Winter Olympics may be the most demeaning. The UK and Canada have followed the US and Australia in announcing a diplomatic boycott of February’s games in Beijing over China’s human rights record. It’s a crushing blow to the communist dictatorship: Xi Jinping has been unable to sleep or dress himself since learning that the deputy head of the British mission will be skipping the mixed doubles luge final.

The UK’s boycott may not even be a boycott, with Boris Johnson saying ‘we do not support sporting boycotts but there are certainly no plans for ministers to attend the Winter Olympics’, then confirming there would be ‘effectively a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in Beijing’, and thereafter stating: ‘I do not think that sporting boycotts are sensible and that remains the policy of the government’. All three positions were announced in the space of nine minutes at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday. The trouble with Johnson is not that he has no principles but that he has so many.

The trouble with Johnson is not that he has no principles but that he has so many

Everyone is very pleased with themselves, as though a grievous blow has been struck against Chinese authoritarianism. Messaging and symbolism are key to diplomacy but that is the problem: the west’s response to the rogue regime in Beijing never seems to move beyond carefully-worded statements and the occasional frown. To recap, 5.28 million deaths worldwide have been linked to a virus that, at the very least, China attempted to cover up and, at the very worst, could have been created in a Chinese lab and then shushed. Beijing has all but smothered the semi-liberal semi-democracy that Hong Kong had settled into in the post-British era, not least with its insidious National Security Law.

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