Psaki Announces Diplomatic Boycott of Beijing Olympics

CLAY: The WTA, the Women’s Tennis Association, stood up to China over their treatment of a Chinese tennis player when that woman accused a prominent communist official of sexual assault, and they pulled all of their WTA events out of China as a result. That seems to have woken up many of the people around the country who had been allowing Chinese communist dictatorships to dictate what they did and did not say.

Including among that group potentially the Biden administration which today has announced a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics. Crazily, and a lot of you probably have forgotten about this, but Beijing is hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics which begin in February just a couple of months from now. Jen Psaki made that announcement at the White House today. This is what it sounded like. Let’s play cut 20.

PSAKI: Everybody can call it whatever they want to call it. I would just remind you that, uh, (sputters) often when you use “diplomatic boycott,” that phrase, uh, that brings people back to 1980. Uh, and we are not — the athletes will be participating. We will be rooting for the athletes from home. I am an Olympics-obsessed person; so I’m looking forward to doing that. But I think this is just an indication that it cannot be business as usual, that not sending a diplomatic delegation sends that message.

That does not mean — Uh, I think this was your question, just to come back to it — that we are — that is the end of the, uh, concerns we will raise about human rights abuses in Xinjiang. We’ve already taken a number of steps. We’ve been a leader in the world and leading actions through the G7. We’re obviously also working with Congress. Uh, but this is just, uh, sending a message that given these human rights abuses, we cannot, uh, proceed with business as usual.

CLAY: We disagree, Buck, with a lot the Biden administration does. Is this enough or do you like the idea? I’ve argued for, personally, saying, “We’re not sending our athletes to Beijing.” We’re going to throw our own Winter Olympics in the United States for democracy-leading countries, right, Western democracies. We’ll do it at Park City or somewhere like that.

We could do it in Vancouver if Canada wanted to be involved. I’m not sure this is enough of a statement to be made against China. It’s better than nothing. But not sending Joe Biden… I don’t think Joe Biden was gonna go anybody or whoever it was gonna be, good or bad move?

BUCK: It’s not really going to mean very much. I mean, I think that on one hand you only really punish athletes by telling the athletes they can’t go —

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: — and even if you had your own thing, if all the other athletes are in Beijing then it doesn’t really matter, right? I think a lot of companies are gonna find right now, some people are starting to speak out a little bit. Okay, well, are they speaking out about just other corporate interactions with China or they gonna take on the companies that they work for as corporate interactions with China? I’m thinking of certain CNN folks. So we’ll see.

CLAY: It’s encouraging but only in a small way. Curious to see what is gonna happen.