Lucy Carne: Australia cannot turn a blind eye and compete in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics

China’s appalling abuse of Uighur human rights cannot be covered up by cute Olympic propaganda. It’s time Australia makes it clear where we stand on these atrocities, writes Lucy Carne.

Bing Dwen Dwen – the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic mascot – is a harmless cartoon panda with cute eyes who wears a space suit of ice.

But it’s the red heart symbol nestled in the little creature’s palm that is offensive to anyone with a conscience.

The heart represents China’s “hospitality”, according to Olympic marketing guff. But presumably that’s a different type of “hospitality” than that forced upon the estimated one million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities detained in Chinese internment camps over the past three years.

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We’re now a year away from the 2022 Winter Games and with it will come the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda deluge of fireworks, flags and cute Bing Dwen Dwens everywhere. But despite the Games’ carefully curated imagery, there is a wave of dissent building among democratic nations.

Bing Dwen Dwen, the mascot of the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Games. Picture: Xinyu Cui/Getty Images

Re-education camps, organ harvesting, systematic rape, torture, infanticide and forced sterilisation – it’s becoming impossible to ignore the growing allegations of genocide by China against the Uighurs.

As evidence of these shocking atrocities continue to emerge, calls are now increasing worldwide for nations to stand against China’s human rights abuse by boycotting the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Last week the Canadian parliament voted overwhelmingly in support of a motion that China’s actions constituted genocide and that it must be stripped of its role as Games host. If not, Canada has threatened to withdraw its team from competing at Beijing.

UK Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey also last week demanded Britain and Team GB boycott next year’s Chinese spectacle.

“This is a genocide happening in front of our eyes,” he said.

In reply, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the UK did not “normally” support sporting boycotts.

President Biden’s secretary of state Antony Blinken has called China’s policy towards the Uighurs a genocide.

When asked last week about a potential US team boycott of the Winter Games, he said it was something for the US together with “fellow democracies” to sort out “in close consultation”.

A high-security facility near what is believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained in China's northwestern Xinjiang region. Picture: Greg Baker / AFP

Australia will send about 50 athletes to Beijing 2022, making it one of our biggest winter teams.

We may be a small country, but we are persuasive. Taking a position against genocide would not only serve to possibly ratify boycotts by other nations, but would also send a message of Australia’s solidarity with those being persecuted.

“Australia has every right and Australians have every expectation to keep away from the Beijing Winter Olympics,” Australian Federation of Islamic Councils president Dr Rateb Jneid tells me.

“China has decimated the human rights of minorities, especially in illegally annexed East Turkestan where they’ve enslaved the Uighur people.

“China, not satisfied with only persecuting its citizens and immediate neighbours such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and East Turkestan, but it has also taken a hostile and highly aggressive attitude to Australia and towards every person who calls out its persecution of individuals and nations.

“Australia should do more than boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics, Australia should take every legal course within the international community to compel China to stop its foreign aggressions and internal persecutions and human rights abuses.”

Australia is set to send its biggest team to the Beijing Winter Olympics. Picture: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images

Of course there will be the argument that politics should be kept out of sport. But should we risk repeating the 1936 Berlin Games hosted by Hitler, to which Australia regrettably sent 32 athletes?

In a Fox News op-ed last week, former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said China was “more obviously dangerous today than Nazi Germany was in 1936”.

Watching our competitors celebrate in Beijing – and in doing so promote the CCP – will not sit well with Aussies.

Certainly, boycotting the Games would be heartbreaking for our athletes who have persevered to make it to the pinnacle arena for their sport.

But when do gold medals become more important than the protection of human life and rights?

China has still not explained the drone footage of shackled and blindfolded men boarding trains or China’s US embassy tweet that Uighur Muslim women were no longer “baby-making machines” thank to the mass “re-education camps”.

It has failed to respond to the distressing testimony given to the BBC last month by victims, witnesses and guards of systemic sexual abuse in these camps.

It’s time for Australia to make it clear where we stand as a nation on this issue.

By supporting the Beijing Winter Olympics, we are walking into a house on fire and ignoring the flames.

But no amount of cute pandas can distract from the human rights abuse China does not want us to see.