Chinese "Squid Games" Mired in Controversy From the Start

People are incredulous and outraged about the controversial $3.4 billion Olympic games that begin today. The first unbelievable thing is the absence of the one element central to any Winter Olympics:  snow. 

Olympic organizers should have known this would be a problem.  Between January and March of last year, the competition venue at the National Alpine Ski Centre in Yanqing (50 miles NW of Beijing) had less than one inch of snow cm of snow-- less than London or Madrid.

And pictures of the venues tell their own story. The new national ski-jumping center is certainly impressive – but sits incongruously in a barren landscape of dirty brown hills. It's hardly alpine.  As for the snowboarding slope, it has been built in the heart of the city's concrete-clad industrial area, overlooked by the massive former cooling towers of an old steel mill.

Dubious decisions by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in awarding the Games are nothing new.  For the 2014 Games in the subtropical Russian resort of Sochi, 80 per cent of the snow was fake.  But Yanqing, which hosts the alpine skiing, bobsleigh, luge and skeleton, will take the phony white stuff to new extremes. Using 49 million gallons of water, 300 snow guns will blanket the competition surfaces – despite the regular water shortages that China's parched capital suffers.

Chinese authorities have detained two prominent human-rights activists in the lead up to the games-- quietly intensifying a crackdown on dissent weeks before the country hosts the most politicized Winter Olympics in recent memory.  Free speech advocate Yang Maodong was formally detained in the southern city of Guangzhou on suspicion of inciting subversion, just two days after his wife died of cancer in the U.S.  Yang, who writes under the pen name Guo Feixiong, has been blocked from leaving China for the past year.  Authorities rejected his pleas (and entreaties from friends and family) that he be allowed to be with his wife in her final months.  Friends said they had lost contact with the 55-year-old Yang in early December, though it was only until January 12 that police officially confirmed his detention by the state.  According to Yang's sister, the police have been vague about the reason for his detention. 

Xie Yang, a 49-year-old lawyer who has taken up politically sensitive cases related to religion and land rights, was detained on January 11 also on subversion charges, and is being held in the southern city of Changsha, according to his family. Yang has been in police custody on and off since 2013. While in detention five years ago, he gave an explosive account of being tortured, beaten and threatened by interrogators.   "You can imagine authorities all over the country are tightening control preemptively to strike out an potential dissent and criticism," said Renee Xia, a senior researcher with Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a Washaington, DC-based group.

Chinese authorities also pressured dissidents and activists ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympics.  Under President Xi Jinping, China has grown less tolerant of dissent, tightening controls over the media and the internet while pursuing a campaign of forced assimilation against ethnic minorities in remote regions of the country.  And of course, all of this is happening during the slow-motion erosion of civil liberties in Hong Kong.

Human Rights Watch says China wants to 'sportswash' its human-rights record.  A spokesman said: "These Winter Games reflect President Xi Jinping's efforts to burnish China's image on the world stage and distract attention from the Chinese government's assault on human rights, targeting independent civil society, erasing press freedom and expanding high- tech surveillance."

Beijing Olympics are being operated in closed, heavily censored environment. Those outside can’t enter. Those inside can’t leave, and can only catch glimpses of the country from bus windows.  Chinese staff working the Games wear white hazmat suits that make it difficult to see the person inside, lending to dystopian atmosphere that many are comparing to the Korean TV show Squid Game. The ill-fated games were plagued by controversy from the very start, however . . . 

It is widely believed that the Beijing Olympics theme song, "The Snow and Ice Dance" was plagiarized from the 2013 Disney film "Frozen."  A Chinese media outlet cited technical analysis of the two songs, showing that the two songs employ a piano as the major instrument, have similar prelude chords and an eight-beat introduction, and they run at almost exactly the same tempo.

There have been widespread cybersecurity concerns over the My2022 app, which the Chinese government is requiring all athletes, audience members, and media to install on their phones.  The app is purportedly to aid in daily Covid monitoring-- a Citizen Lab report on the My2022 app discovered a "censorship keywords" list built into the app, and a feature that allows people to flag other "politically sensitive" expressions. The list of words included the names of Chinese leaders and government agencies, as well as references to the 1989 killing of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, and the religious group Falun Gong. Many participating governments have gone so far as to advise their athletes to leave their phones at home, bring burner phones and use temporary email accounts for the duration of the games.

China's criminal threats against free speech are now suddenly being hurled against any visiting athletes. Just last month, the Beijing Organizing Committee even went so far to warn even foreign athletes that "Any behavior or speech that is against the Olympic spirit, especially against Chinese laws and regulations, are also subject to certain punishment."  China’s stance falls in line with the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) established rule against political protest at the Games. The IOC also announced before last year’s Summer Games in Tokyo that athletes who staged protests there would be punished, ignoring U.S. calls to allow respectful protest for human rights issues.  Even though the IOC charter only forbids “demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda” at Olympic venues,  the Chinese government is now saying that “speech” could be subject to punishment and cited Chinese law, which is far more restrictive.  In China, critics of the government have routinely been sentenced to prison for comments they make on social media. 

Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai made explosive allegations against China’s former vice premier Zhang Gaoli in November, saying he coerced her into sex. Peng disappeared from public view, prompting international expressions of concern for her safety.

In December, the United States and Australia announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter games.  Since then, the boycott was joined by the European Union, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, Canada, Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.  At the last minute, China announced that it would not be selling tickets to any of the events and NBC announced that all of its sports announcers would be skipping China and commentating from their Connecticut broadcast facility.   So its looking more and more like this will be a "non-Olympics" with no one in the stands and no one in the broadcasting booths-- just going through the motions to let the athletes set records and have their faces seen on TV.  After the two weeks is over, China can go back to torturing the Uyghurs and repressing the basis human rights of the rest of its citizens.

In the days leading up to the Opening Ceremony, the Chinese government signaled its defensiveness to all the criticism by leveling its most ridiculous accusation yet. China Daily, an English-language newspaper run by the ruling Chinese Communist Party's Publicity Department, said that the United States has a plan to "incite athletes from various countries to express their discontent toward China, play passively in competition and even refuse to take part".  A U.S. Embassy spokesman responded saying, "We were not and are not coordinating a global campaign regarding participation at the Olympics."